CHAPTER V 



GOLF AT COLONSAY 



MORE than once during my many visits to Colonsay 

 I caught myself wondering what would be the en- 

 hanced value which a proprietor of the island would 

 derive from its golf courses if it could be transported 

 within any reasonable distance of some of the great 

 centres of population. There are certainly five places, 

 if not more, upon the 12,000 acres where a first-class 

 eighteen-hole course could be constructed without 

 any very great expenditure of money and labour. In 

 these days when golf architecture has become a 

 science, and so-called links are constructed on inland 

 parks, suburban commons, and even on the Egyptian 

 desert within hail of the Sphinx and the Pyramids, 

 people have almost forgotten that the game owed 

 its origin to the physical characteristics of those tracts 

 of waste country round most of our seaside resorts 

 which, with their bent -grown hillocks, and short 

 springy turf, are known by the name of links even in 

 the rare instances when they are still unprofaned by 

 driver and niblick. 



In such places, far from the madding crowd, 

 the ancestors of our present champions amused 

 themselves by propelling a ball from green to green, 

 a self-selected ball never " standardised " but de- 

 veloped from an unknown quantity to the feather- 



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