NAME THIS HOLE BY BERNARD DARWIN.
IWAS playing lately on a course which is destined, -1- when it grows a little older, to be one of the very best in Scotland. This is the new course at Turnberry, in Ayrshire. Its neighbour, the old course, has always been full of charm, but for real golfing quality it will, I think, have to yield to the new. However, I am not setting out to describe it. I mention it because it gives me a text. It possesses two successive holes, the fifteenth and sixteenth, with names that will almost certainly cling to them and may even become classic. One is called " The Dirl," and this, in the language of Burns, means " a mighty blow." At least, so I am told by a friend who has proposed the immortal memory on Burns night in a speech lasting an hour and a half, so he ought to know. The other is called Mount Olympus, and is rather like it ; I lived over against the real mountain for something like a year and a half, so I ought to know.
These are both clearly good names, and yet I make bold to say that they are not of the very best brand. There is something just a little too consciously picturesque
* Photographs of this Bungalow Classroom are to be found in " Open-air Schools," by I. G. Machines, published by Christchurch (N.Z.) Press Co., and obtainable from Messrs. Whitcombe and Tombs, Ltd., 9-10 St. Andrews Hill, Queen Victoria Street, B.C. Price Ifid. through booksellers, or post free 7d.
about them. The best names and those which sound in our ears to-day the most romantic are those which have gradually come into being, no one knows how or when, because they fulfil a descriptive purpose. On the old maps of St. Andrew's links there may be seen, on the way to the Corner of the Dyke, a small bunker, now defunct, called Tam's Coo. It lay, if I remember rightly, a little short of the Principal's Nose. Here is the perfect name. It arose quite simply from the fact that a certain Thomas tethered his cow there and the cow, by trampling within the limits of her narrow prison, made a bunker. Take many of the other names at St. Andrew's which give us a thrill ; they are, in truth, prosaic statements of fact. The High Hole does stand high, overlooking the waters of the Eden. There is still some heather at the Heathery Hole, as there are shells in the Shell bunker : the outgoing and incoming battalions still cross one another at the Hole o' Cross, and no one who has ever overrun the seventeenth green need ask why it is called the Road Hole.
Much the same may be said of the names at Hoylake, almost the only English course on which names are still used in place of pedestrian numbers. Two of the most famous, the Dowie and the Dun, commemorate particular players, but the Stand tells of the days when Hoylake was a racecourse, the Royal is hard by the front door of the Royal Hotel, the home of the illustrious family of Ball, and the Rushes, the Punchbowl, the Cop, the Field, the Lake and the rest (I love to roll them luxuri- ously on my tongue) mean exactly what they say. Only the Alps is a purple patch, an essay in the more deliber- ately picturesque style, and after all the real Alps, where we hit over the mountain top and wondered what had happened, is no more. But stay, I had almost forgotten the really lovely name among them all. It is seldom heard now, but when I first went to Hoylake, men often talked of playing to the Lake by way of Johnny Ball's Gap. Just as Baedeker tells us that Thermopylae is greatly changed since Leonidas's day, so this other narrow pass, consecrated to a hero, is now in effect no more. All men can do with the rubber core what only heroes could do with the gutty, but the name shcul I be preserved, even at the risk of being too consciously archaic, for it touches the highest point of romance.
It is my gloomy belief that the day of these great names is over. There are now so many courses, and we flit so fast from one to the other, that we are not really and truly at home on any one of them ; if we can remember the numbers of the holes it is as much as we can manage. Names grow up only when men play all their golf on one course, and come to know every little turn and twist in the ground. I am confirmed in this belief by a personal experience. Only once in my life have I played for a whole year upon one single course. This was in the War time, on an emphatically home-made course, when I lived, as I said before, opposite Mount Olympus. Many of the holes took to themselves names, and no one could say who invented them. At the Water Hole, where the gipsy girl used to come and beg from us with her insinuat- ing whine of " Dona penny, Johnny," we played over a little muddy creek. At the Skull Hole we used the skull of a deceased sheep in lieu of a flag. A horse once chose to die in one of our bunkers, and very inconvenient he was until " all the King's horses and all the King's men," in the form of the sanitary section, took him away again. That was called the Dead Horse's Bunker ever afterwards, and at the Helmet Hole our flag was an old blue trench helmet cast away by some French infantryman. The third hole, where the hungry, wolfish dogs would come creeping and snarling ever nearer to our heels as we waggled, was the Thistle Hole. That was no affected Scotticism : there were thistles by the green, and in summer time they grew into a mighty grove higher than our heads. I do not quote these names as having any especial merit, but they grevi up naturally in the right way, and had our course continued to exist (indeed I believe Greek golfers play on it to-day) they would have _come in time to have a stirring and historic sound.
It must be frankly admitted that the Scot has a greater genius for naming holes than we English have ever acquired. We can hardly rise beyond the name of a battle or a mountain or some variant of Hades (they say it discreetly in Burmese at Hayling Island). But there are some really' apt names even on quite modern courses in Scotland. At Gleneagles, for instance, there is the Kittle Kink, just a little too elaborate possibly, but still a good descriptive name for a " dog-leg " hole. I like the Wee Bogle too, conceived as it is in a rather different style, and also Braid's Brawest. Perhaps these Scottish names are particularly attractive to the Saxon because, like Mr. Micawber when he quoted Auld Lang Syne and came to the " gowans fine," we are not precisely aware what they mean.
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