Living The Highland Life

Standing on the first tee at the Nairn Golf Club in the Scottish Highlands, I was so struck by the tremendous contrast between the vibrant yellow gorse and slate gray sea that I scarcely noticed the caddy loading my bag onto a pull cart.

I gave the caddie a questioning glance, and he caught my eye.

"When I turned 75 last year," he said shortly, "I stopped shouldering the bag."

My septuagenarian friend proved to be indispensable on the rolling, heaving fairways of the 124-year-old Archie and Old Tom Morris design which underwent modifications by James Braid in the 1920s. With fast, eccentric greens and pushed up bunkers resembling the waves cresting on the Moray Firth, this esteemed links course hosted the 1999 Walker Cup.

Scottish golf expert Malcolm Campbell claims that "only those who can find the fairway with rapier precision" can survive Nairn. What's left unsaid is that the tool required after missing the fairway might well be a machete.

The round at Nairn was the beginning of a Scottish golf odyssey that, over 72 hours, would encompass seven completed rounds on five different courses in four separate locations separated by 300 miles of wrong-side-of-the-road driving. This marathon was followed by a cruise down the Caledonian Canal on the 117-foot Scottish Highlander, a former barge that was converted into a luxurious floating hotel. When it was time to board the barge I was quite exhausted and ready to hole up in my well-appointed cabin and sleep for a week.

Luckily I was roused in time to feel the bracing air as we motored down the canal and catch a seemingly infrequent ray of Scottish sunlight glinting off of the water. There were mammoth swans escorting the barge, ospreys feeding their young in a nearby fir tree and the first sighting of Loch Ness. And that was just in the first half-hour.

The 60-mile long Caledonian Canal was constructed in 1822 to provide a safer and more efficient means to navigate from the North Sea to the Atlantic. These days the canal hosts mainly pleasure craft; sailboats, cabin cruisers and "monster" charters abound.

There was no sign of "Nessie," but our attention was drawn to the sheer rock face that rises immediately at the shoreline of Loch Ness. It makes the initial foray through the loch look something like a green and heather version of the Colorado River winding through the steep confines of the Grand Canyon. Scotland's best known body of water is pitch black just below the surface, just a few degrees above freezing and up to 800 feet deep. Not exactly a water-skiing paradise.

There was paradise of a different sort at delightful Cruden Bay Golf Club though, where all the members aren't caddies, but all of the caddies happen to be members. This isolated outpost is 20 miles north of Aberdeen on the eastern coast.

Architect Tom Simpson devised the course routing in 1899 using pick and shovel, fitting in the holes between massive sand dunes covered with long, wavy Marram grass. The 6,400-yard roller coaster sets up as a figure-eight, winding down from the clubhouse and close to the sea, and then back again. The course has an interesting range of holes both punitive and diminutive, but shows its true character close by the beach. Would you believe three consecutive blind greens, including a blind par 3?

Links golf is normally quite flat, but not so along this northeast coast. Neighbors like Royal Aberdeen and Murcar are full of elevated tee shots and uphill climbs to raised greens, but Cruden Bay is the king of the hills. The panorama from the ninth fairway of jagged cliffs in the distance tumbling down towards the sea is as dramatic a golf course view as you'll find this side of the Monterey Peninsula.

Besides its status as the birthplace of golf, Scotland is also well known for the rugged beauty of the landscape and friendliness of its people. But a capital of cuisine it's not. Fortunately our barge chef, Damon, was a shining ray of light in the land of black pudding and haggis. Foot and Mouth disease is but a rumor in the Highlands, as there have been few reported cases north of the English border. Far more insidious is Food in Mouth disease, where self-control wavers at the prospect of missing a single course of the young Australian's inventive cuisine.

The finest course in the Highlands is also one of the most remote. The unprepossessing pro shop at Royal Dornoch gives no indication of the magnificence that lies ahead. The links unfolds in front of and below you on the third tee like a golfer's Elysian Field. It's a logical, beautiful routing, with holes strung along Embo Bay in the mouth of the Dornoch Firth. Golf has been played on these grounds since the 1600s, but Old Tom Morris is credited with the current design, completed in the late 1800s.

The 6,500-yard par-70 course has some pronounced elevation changes, playing down into a long hollow heading out and then up a plateau heading home. Unlike Cruden Bay though, great as that golf course is, the elevation changes at Royal Dornoch generally occur hole to hole and not shot to shot. The design exudes elegant simplicity, as there's little in the way of ungainly mounding or severely sloping fairway lies.

Unlike most Scottish courses with hidden hazards, virtually all of the cavernous greenside and fairway bunkers are visible from the tee or approach areas. Architectural icon Donald Ross was a Dornoch native and was influenced by the marvelous raised greens at his hometown course in much of his later work, particularly at famed Pinehurst No. 2.

Nearby is the Carnegie Links at Skibo Castle, a Donald Steel design from 1995. Some Scots malign the course as contrived, but resistance here is automatic to anything less than a century old.

Carnegie is both dangerous and gorgeous, with narrow, twisting fairways laid between the Dornoch Firth and Loch Evelix. A great gorse covered dune acts as the spine of the 6,700-yard course, offering a natural delineation between parallel fairways. It may not have the antiquity or pedigree of its royal neighbor at Dornoch, but two rounds played on these courses, easily accomplished in a single day, is as fine a 36-hole banquet as you'll find anywhere in the golfing kingdom.

As the barge neared the Atlantic Ocean at canal's end, the scenery began to change. The waterway had been mostly straightforward and commercial through much of the journey, but it began to narrow and softly curve in either direction, like a winding river. Fields of wildflowers and old stone farmhouses came into view, with cattle grazing and horses in the pasture. It offered an entirely different perspective on Scottish beauty.

The final round of the trip took place at tiny Fort Augustus, a simple nine-hole track that falls miles below the radar of the cognoscenti. This is a primitive course by any standard, where the greens are cut like fairways, the fairways are cut like rough and the rough covered with sheep. Animals outnumber humans here by a large margin.

I teed off in total seclusion, the only sound the bleating of the herd. Striding the property like a modern day flock tender with a titanium shepherd's crook provided a clear vision of what the game was like in centuries past.

The wooly maintenance staff does their job all to well, and there's precious little grass to be found among the hardpan, cracked earth and rocky terrain. Even the hard-boiled Scot, seemingly the only other player on the golf course, encouraged me to play preferred lies as he passed on an adjacent fairway.

In a brogue thick as Guinness he exclaimed over his shoulder, "the game's hard enough already, don't you think?" Aye, it is difficult, I thought to myself, surveying the stony ground and the sweeping vista before me.