Golf is said to be very fashionable these days. Young professionals are reclaiming the game from ruddy faced chaps in old corduroy trousers and yellow jumpers. Your modern golfer dresses sharp, drives a great car and follows his time on the course with a stay in some groovy gastro-boutique joint. He demands swishiness after his swishes, and newly cool England delivers it. So I headed off to the West Country to experience this new phenomenon: to hip, regenerated, beachy, switched-on Devon and Cornwall. Five of the best, most spectacular and sternest golf courses in the west have come together to create the Atlantic Links challenge, a self-explanatory blast around our rockiest and rock’n’rolliest coastline.
Golf may be trendy with male fashion houses falling over themselves to bring out chic golf ranges, however, it transpired they were less keen to kit out three fortysomething blokes on a jaunt to the West Country. Had we been Hugh Grant in, say, Antigua, they would have been interested. But for me, Shaggy Stuart and Bald Giles going to Cornwall, the negotiations were short and unsatisfactory. I did my best with a pair of seven-year old Jigsaw hipsters and a diamond-patterned jumper I picked up at a charity knitwear sale. I was striving for a Sean Connery in Goldfinger vibe; but I am perfectly willing to accept it didn’t quite come off. Shaggy Stuart wore vaguely black shapeless things. Bald Giles looks like what he is: a photographer, and we know what they look like. At least he wouldn’t be in the pictures.
The transport, however, was a bit more in the Bond league. Bentley came through with a GTC Continental. Result. And the drive west was very nice (but I won’t bang on about thrilling torque ratios and dynamic sport suspension). Night was falling as I coasted towards Trevose Golf and Country Club, our first destination. The first person we saw in the clubhouse was a ruddy-faced chap in a yellow jumper and old corduroys.
This boutiquey swishy thing has still to sweep the entire golf and country club scene. A mate of mine who owns some fashionable restaurants in London once told me he was thinking of setting up a new kind of golf club for people who don’t like golf clubs – a kind of Soho House of the links, no blazers, no rules about swearing. But he hasn’t done it yet. In the meantime, you get joints like Trevose. It’s a pleasant, whitewashed building. The carpet has a practical blue pattern and the chairs sort of go with it. It values cosiness over style. It’s the kind of place where you feel comfortable if you happen to be wearing a yellow jumper and corduroys.
And you know what? Three cheers for Trevose. The beer was great, the owner an excellent bloke (one of those London exiles who make exile from London seem like a thoroughly sound idea) and the chap in the yellow jumper was delightful and full of good advice about the weather. The food was substantial but also with rather more Mediterranean healthiness than you usually see on a golf club menu. The apartments won’t be troubling the editors of Wallpaper* magazine, but we slept like babies. Babies who dream of gales and shipwrecks, mind. According to the chap in the yellow jumper, the worst storm of the year was on the horizon. Trevose was wonderful to play in fine conditions; in high winds and lashing rain, purgatory.
But the day, miraculously, dawned bright and sunny. The fairways rolled towards a sparkling Atlantic and all nature was crying out for you to grab your three-wood and give it some welly. The car park was a marvellous sight. The rural middle classes in thick socks, unloaded bags and labradors from their estate cars beaming those special beams English people do when the weather turns out nice after all. At breakfast we saw the real point of the clubhouse design: huge windows displaying one of the most romantic links courses in Britain. Then you stand on the first tee, buffeted by the wind, narrow your eyes towards the rocky shore as the course opens up beneath your feet and life feels very good – if slightly terrifying too.
I won’t offer a hole-by-hole description of the round, instead we’ll pass lightly over the slices, the mishits, the Rock Hudsons (looked straight but wasn’t) – and we’ll concentrate on the Betjeman moment instead. It wasn’t really fashion that lured me to the links of the west, but the late poet laureate and architecture critic. Betjeman was an aesthete rather than a sportsman, but he played golf and loved Cornwall. He also wrote ‘Seaside Golf’, undoubtedly the best and possibly the only ode to a birdie on a par four ever written. It begins:
How straight it flew, how long it flew,
It clear’d the rutty track
And soaring, disappeared from view
Beyond the bunker’s back –
A glorious, sailing, bounding drive
That made me glad I was alive.
My Betjeman moment came on the par five fifth, a beautiful, long tease of a hole which winds through a narrow dune system (which Shaggy Stuart explored in some detail) before the dunes emerge so close to the shore you don’t know whether to take out a putter or a surf board. Early one morning the greenkeeper actually found a surfer who pitched his tent on the green, which gives me a perfect excuse to say that’s exactly where my pitch ended up.
