For years I told anybody who would listen that Askernish Old was the world’s greatest golf course. “Hard to get to,” I’d say, “because it’s on an island off the North Atlantic coast of Scotland. But it’s brilliant. Spectacular. A links course on land that time forgot.” To bolster my case, I pointed out that Askernish was designed in 1891 by four-time British Open champion Old Tom Morris, golf’s pioneer course builder and greenkeeper. “Played it in 1990,” I’d say. “Had the course to myself.”
Sometimes I left out the fact that I was the only person on the planet who knew that the course even existed.
I was startled, therefore, to receive an e-mail last summer from one Ralph Thompson, who claimed to be chairman of the Askernish Golf Club: “Happy that you ranked us number one in your Golf.com Top 50 Golf Course Ratings. Any chance of your coming back to play again?” Puzzled, I clicked on the provided link and got the club’s website. That’s how I learned that the course Old Tom designed in 1891—most of which had been abandoned before World War II and had gone unplayed until I walked it eighteen years ago—was under construction (I should say reconstruction) and scheduled to open in 2008. The gist was, Lost Golf Course Rediscovered: Old Tom Morris Gem to Be Restored.
“How many times can you lose a bloody golf course?” I asked my wife. “Should I have drawn them a map?”
The truth is, last September I needed a map myself to find my way back to Askernish, hidden as it is on a small island in the Outer Hebrides. From Edinburgh I drove north into the Scottish Highlands, hitting the Skye Bridge by mid-afternoon and crossing that scenic island to the ferry port of Uig, which is pronounced as if you’ve just taken a blow to the stomach (“OOO-ig”). I caught the six o’clock car ferry to North Uist, dined on steak-and-kidney pie during the crossing, and rolled off the ramp at Lochmaddy at 7:45. That left just an hour’s drive down three treeless, boulder-strewn islands to South Uist. The one-track road, which has passing turnouts every few hundred yards, skirts small lochs and rocky hills covered with grass and heather.
It was dark when I checked into the Borrodale Hotel, a cozy inn just outside the sea village of Lochboisdale. I was immediately pounced upon by Thompson, a big shambling fellow with short brown hair and a jester’s disposition. “I’m the head liar,” he said by way of introduction. “Self-appointed.” Thompson led me to the hotel’s function room, where a passel of wealthy Brits had gathered for a slide show and lecture by Gordon Irvine, links-golf consultant and 1986 Scottish greenkeeper of the year. I found a seat as the lights dimmed.
Irvine, a still-youthful man with a brush haircut and a strong Ayrshire accent, opened with a story. He said he had first visited South Uist on a fishing trip in December 2005. At the urging of a friend, he had also checked out the island’s nine-hole golf course. “The lads here were convinced they were playing an Old Tom Morris course,” he said. “But when Ralph took me out, I had to say, ‘No, you’re wrong.’” The Askernish course was flat and featureless, the kind of layout a farmer might mow out of any similar sea meadow.
But then, Irvine explained further, he went for a stroll with Thompson. They walked across the course toward a beach that catches the Atlantic’s occasional wrath. They scampered up a dune that overlooks the sea. And there, stretching before them, was a swath of pristine linksland to make a Scotsman blubber. “I’m thinking of Cruden Bay,” Irvine said, referring to the venerable links course on Scotland’s eastern shore. “I could think of no site more dramatic.”
The greenkeeper knew at first glance what he was beholding: an abandoned golf course. A ghost course. “You stand there,” Irvine said, “and it’s just waiting to be played.”
His eyes searched the shadows behind the projector. Spotting me, he said, “Well, you know.”
I certainly did, because Irvine’s story was my story. In the spring of 1990, Sports Illustrated asked me to check out the rumor that there was a long-forgotten Old Tom Morris course in the Gaelic-speaking Outer Hebrides. With my wife at my side, I traveled to the island, played the simple nine-hole course, and reached the same conclusion Irvine did: Old Tom might have slept in town, but he hadn’t built a golf course there. After three uneventful days slapping balls around the gentle meadow, however, I climbed the looking-glass dune for a look around.
“I froze in my tracks,” I wrote. “The terrain was suddenly as violent as a storm-tossed sea. Canyons wound through grassy dunes carved by winter gales. Sand spilled down dune walls. Shadows collected in sinister pools. If this was not Ballybunion, on Ireland’s southwest shore, I was damned.”
There was no one to stop me that day, so I teed up a ball and drilled a two-iron shot to an imaginary fairway. I romped through the dunes for an hour or so, playing winter rules. I hit to natural green sites. When I spotted a hole or burrow, I tried to chip in, in the manner of the ancient Scots.
I christened my secret links Askernish Old.
On to the new. The morning after Irvine’s slide show, the lot of us shuttled out to Askernish to play. It was cool and windy, but spirits were high. Our host was Malcolm Peake, an Englishman with gray hair, a florid face and the bearing of a cabinet minister.
“Ralph and Gordon were terrified about my bringing a group here,” said Peake, a drumbeater for sustainable greenkeeping practices who had volunteered to promote Askernish. “They’re afraid the course will be unplayable in its raw state. But you walk down these holes and it’s unbelievable. It’s Ballybunion, Turnberry, Troon. If Askernish hadn’t been isolated in the Hebrides, it never would have been lost.”
Askernish was, in fact, unplayable—the part-time greenkeeping staff had not yet fully mown much of the course. As a consequence, any ball landing four inches or more off the fairway disappeared into knee-high fescue and wildflowers. The course was also littered with rabbit warrens—vast underground bunny condos that swallowed golf balls and made fairways look like World War I battlefields. The greens were somewhat lacking as well, with bumps, potholes and shaggy grass. My mental Stimpmeter produced readings of four or less.
Those quibbles aside, Askernish was as stunning as advertised. In March 2006, Irvine had returned with Martin Ebert, a Canadian course architect who trained with Donald Steel, and with help from local golfers unearthed eighteen Old Tom gems. Three holes in particular—the first, sixth and eighteenth—required the most imagination, as they had to be shaped out of the unimpressive nine-hole course. This area, apparently, actually had been part of the Old Tom Morris design, but in the 1930s it was flattened by hand and horse power to create a grass airfield. “It’s fair to say I’ve had to do some gentle redesign in the area of the runways,” acknowledged Irvine, “but I feel confident that these green sites are where Old Tom would have had them.”
The result is a course that begins and ends in understated fashion, in the manner of Turnberry. From seven through seventeen, however, the journey is mind-blowing. The par-four seventh runs south along the shore from a dune-top tee to a green sheltered by even taller dunes. The green at the eleventh, a long and spectacular par three playing directly into the sea wind, looks as if it could only be reached using ropes and crampons. And what can I say about sixteen? Dubbed Old Tom’s Pulpit, this unforgettable par four has a two-level green, the back half of which forms a punchbowl, which is where most approach shots end up, the pulpit being as hard to hold as a stone parapet.
Irvine, who worked for free, believes that based on his ability to distinguish natural landforms from man-made ones, he has correctly exposed and re-created the 1891 layout. (Only the eighteenth green had to be relocated; the original now serves as a practice green.) “We’ll never know for sure,” he told me. “We can’t bring Old Tom back. But this course is as close as you’ll get to an original Old Tom Morris layout.”
That was the pitch Irvine used in 2006 at the annual meeting of the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association, hoping to recruit volunteers to help the islanders restore their old course using nineteenth-century technology—i.e., shovels, rakes and hoes. “We identified the greens first,” Irvine said. “The fairway corridors were straightforward; they would obviously have played through the dune slacks.” (Irvine said he knew the course started and ended at the manor home of Lady Emily Gordon Cathcart, the estate’s erstwhile owner; he figured out where the first fairway was from there, then walked out the rest of the fairway corridors and started identifying green sites.) The teeing areas, on the other hand, are all new. “An 1890s course would not have had tees,” said Irvine. “You teed off a few yards away from the hole you just finished.”
The result? A par-seventy-two, 6,164-yard track right out of a time capsule. “Old Tom built a bunch of classic courses, like Muirfield and Prestwick, but he wouldn’t recognize any of them now,” Irvine said. “This one he’d recognize, and I think that’s exciting.” He shrugged. “Whether modern golfers will think it an oddity or museum course, I don’t know. It’s for purists.”
But one has to ask: How did the people of South Uist manage to misplace an eighteen-hole golf course?
“Askernish was a sporting estate,” Thompson told me back at the hotel. “Fishing, shooting and la-di-da golf for the lords and ladies on holiday.” Old Tom’s work presumably went missing, Thompson explained, after the death of Lady Cathcart in 1932. By 1936, a portion of the estate was given over to the grass airstrip, and though golf continued to be played on holes cut on and around the airfield, Old Tom’s handiwork had effectively disappeared. After World War II, by which time the airfield had fallen into disuse, a Dr. Kenneth Robertson attempted to keep the game alive on the island, and by 1970 he had mown a nine-hole course in the same area. But by the mid-eighties Robertson had departed the island and even his modest layout was threatened, as the Askernish Golf Club dwindled to a few disconsolate souls and what greens there were went to daisies. “There was no money,” said Donald MacInnes, the club’s current captain. “If you wanted to play, you had to jump on a fairway mower.”
Alan MacDonald, who after a year of Irvine’s tutelage on other projects recently accepted the position of head greenkeeper, was one of a handful of young men who worked to keep the club alive. “We had no flags, no poles and only a few members,” he recalled. “But a lot of people who didn’t even play golf joined, just to keep things going. Slowly, it started coming back.”
Hope for revitalization was raised by the Scottish Land Reform Act of 2003, which allowed a group of golf enthusiasts to eventually purchase the land outright from the estate’s heirs. But until Irvine showed up with his fishing rod, everything the islanders knew about Old Tom’s layout came from an article in an 1891 golf magazine documenting the visit by Morris (and two-time British Amateur champion Horace Hutchinson) during which he laid out the course. “We used to stand on the old seventh tee and look at what is now the seventh fairway,” MacDonald said. “We’d say ‘Gee, wouldn’t it be great to play there?’ But we never actually took a ball and tried it.”
That job had been left to an American reporter: me.
Now that askernish has been re-found, the club has to get it ready for the official opening, set for late August. By then, Thompson promises, the rabbit holes will be filled, the rough trimmed and the greens rolled, though the course will never be “manicured.” (Indeed, as at many Highlands courses, local crofters will be allowed to use the course for grazing in the winter months.) Still, “four or five years from now,” Irvine predicted, “the greens at Askernish will measure up properly.” Just as critical is the club’s campaign to sign up founding members at $5,000 a pop, money that will come in handy as the final touches are put on the new clubhouse, scheduled to replace the honesty box by May.
The next day I went out to play by myself late in the afternoon, starting on number seven. By the time I got to sixteen, fierce squalls were crashing ashore to the north and south while pale sunlight flooded the valley floor, rendering it an archival brown. A lake of russet rough ran down the right to the pulpit green, which caught the sun perfectly, as if by someone’s design.
I mean, as if by Old Tom’s design.
Final note to members of the Askernish Golf Club: Your course is on the Atlantic shore, running south from the old landing strip to a point in the dunes a quarter mile south of the spot you locals call Taigh Calum Uilleam, just north of the graveyard. If for any reason it should go missing again, please contact me immediately.
