Present-day holes 6, 12, 13 and 14 were involved in
the rerouting,
and a player today catches sight of the stout, crenelated tower
of the
Berrow Parish Church of St. Mary on No. 7. Other views of the edifice
appear sporadically until the difficult 12th, where the green sits
closely
adjacent to church property. On No. 15, the grass turns golden
with afternoon
light. It’s a tough but glorious par 4, with a tiny
kingdom of rises, hollows,
shoulders, gulleys and marram-crowned
knolls.
Playing down the 18th fairway, I got a glimpse of
nature’s role in
the design here. I was playing an accurate drive from
reasonably
undulating ground and stopped to notice how the dune fields left and
right—though more or less level with the mown turf—were just too
fiercely
furrowed to be playable. They were destined from eons earlier
to be the hazards
along this hole. Before any mowing implement defined
the path of play, sheep
would have been cropping those areas less
effectively. Herdsmen would not make
that the customary land to walk
or, later, play their prehistoric stick-and-ball
game along, and no
greenkeeper would ever declare that the “faire
way.”
In other words, logic and
land contour dictated where the ball
should go. And however your 18 logical
paths were drawn up or
officially designated, it would be clear from the start
that, hundreds
of years later, people of good sense would be following those
pathways
thankfully.
