There are few joys like catching a train to the course, although I prefer to think of it as “taking the rattler to the links.” It’s a phrase that feels more redolent of simpler times – of the golden age of golf’s growth from what was a pastime exclusive to English toffs and Scottish oddballs into a leisure activity for all (a transformation fuelled by expansion of the railways).
The word “rattler” alone evokes the clatter of carriages on the tracks, the clatter of clubs in a bag, and the clattering of balls between sandhills by the seaside.
In 1831, Charles Darwin left my hometown of Shrewsbury, travelling south to Plymouth where he boarded “The Beagle” and undertook a voyage which fostered ideas about the natural world that would eventually prompt him to write “On the Origin of Species.”
... it was only the final two hours for me, but what a two hours it is on a train line frequently included among lists of the most scenic in all the world.
At the end of the same century, Darwin’s grandson, Bernard, would delight in travelling in the opposite direction – north by train to Shrewsbury, and from there west toward the Welsh coast and “a course that my soul loved best of all courses in the world.”
That course was Aberdovey, and Darwin, a fine amateur golfer and later a supreme writer about the sport, wrote an essay about his regular journey to the village which GGP’s John Hopkins retraced for The Times in 1995.
Last Thursday, it was my turn. True, it was only the final two hours for me, but what a two hours it is on a train line frequently included among lists of the most scenic in all the world.
It crosses the English-Welsh border close to Ian Woosnam’s family farm, passing first through green hills, then crawling between mountains before following the meandering Dovey River to the Irish Sea. To the south, viewed across the sun-shimmering estuary, are the tumbling dunes of Ynyslas. To the north, the towering peaks of Eryri National Park. Ahead is the wide expanse of Cardigan Bay, reputed to be the site of the lost kingdom of Cantre’r Gwaelod, sometimes referred to as the Welsh Atlantis.
Continue further north and, beyond Royal St David’s Golf Club with its dramatic Harlech Castle backdrop, we’d come to the magical Italianate village of Portmeirion, the slightly bonkers creation of architect Clough Williams-Ellis and location for the entirely bonkers 1960s TV series “The Prisoner.” Enough of that, we think. In the relationship between man and ball, we want to do the chasing.
The station names have revealed that we’ve travelled deep into the heart of Wales, from the anglicised Welshpool and Newtown through to the native Caersws, Machynlleth, Penhelig and, finally, Aberdyfi (Aberdovey).
As preparation for 18 holes, it beats a mad rush through road traffic, as does arrival at a station that is essentially in the club car park. Given how many golf writers have alighted at the platform with a dreamy look in their eye and the distracted air of the permanently lost in thought, it would not have entirely surprised me to be greeted with rolling eyes and a plea to keep the fancy words and ideas to myself. Instead, as always, there was nothing but a friendly welcome from the club, its staff and 18 holes that promise, and deliver, an adventure through the dunes, up the coast, and then back again.
Golf was first played on this stretch of linksland in 1886 when a local family used flowerpots instead of holes. The club was founded six years later, the ground purchased in 1905, and the original layout of the course has been refined by Herbert Fowler, James Braid and Harry Colt. Bernard Darwin was the club’s first captain in 1897, 37 years before he took a similar position with the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews.
Today, the course retains a sense of being at one with the game’s roots. Nature, rather than mechanical diggers, created this test, and that trio of architects only ever tweaked the puzzle. There was never any tearing it up and starting again.
Golf has evolved, but modern designers struggle to create courses that lift the spirits quite like this one. Rare is the golfer with experience of Aberdovey whose face doesn’t light up at the mere mention of it – and last Thursday, despite the back-nine rain, Bernard Darwin’s description of it as “paradise” was also ours.
Matt Cooper
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