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GOLF CLUBS IN—

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— Center of the Golfing Universe —

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BRORA GOLF CLUB

Brora, Sutherland, Northern Scotland

Brora Golf Club offers links golf in its most natural form, just the way God
and James Braid intended: minimally-altered links land surrounded by
the sea and hills of Scotland. Converts to this reactionary style
include the great Australian champion Peter Thomson.
Photo courtesy Brora Golf Club

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Brora Golf Club
Golf Road, Brora, Sutherland
Scotland KW9 6QS UK
Tel: +44 (0)1408 621417
E-mail: secretary@broragolfclub.co.uk
WEB SITE: BRORA GOLF CLUB

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          Peter Thomson is the strapping Aussie legend who won the British Open (herein to be referred to in the resolute manner of Commonwealth golfers as “The Open”) five times in the eleven years between 1954 and 1965. Like many (perhaps most) golf purists, Thomson proselytizes that playing golf on true links courses provides the natural challenges intended by the game’s initiators and all the great, early course designers.
          Links purists prefer all the natural challenges to the bells, whistles, fluff, distractions, and island holes of post-1940’s golf course design. Among the natural challenges to be found on authentic links courses are, of course, lots of moguls on fairways (and, occasionally on greens, too), few trees to block breezes or vision, rough of thorny scrub bushes and tall, wild sea grasses, sandy soil bases that drain well and keep divots thin, and bunkers of exposed pockets of sand that emerge naturally at strategic points around the course and especially beside greens. Also sometimes counted among the “natural” challenges of true links courses can be grazing sheep and/or cattle. Even some man-made encumbrances like railway tracks, roads, pubs, hotels, and lighthouses — if both venerable and pre-existing — are considered natural parts of traditional links courses.
          Take Brora Golf Club, for example. Lying unobtrusively along the North Sea, Brora Golf Club’s course occupies some acreage of former marginal land just north of the small Scottish town of Brora. Purists like Peter Thomson love Brora — not for being among the world’s (or, for that matter, even among Scotland’s) great golf challenges — but for being a quintessential links course, maintaining its carefully distilled 86-year-old purity like the good, local, single-malt Scotch whisky served in its understated, but warmly welcoming clubhouse. Brora, at 6,156 yards, isn’t long, but few true linkses are long by modern standards — one wouldn’t want great length on a course open to the rain and wind that characterizes the North Sea coast of Northern Scotland. No trees obscure Brora. Nor is much water found in play along the course, except for the largely cross-fairway meanderings of two minor streams that peter out on the beach after carry run-off from the Highlands west of Brora. These typical Scottish burns dig their own trenches across the 5th and 11th fairways and trace portions of the 7th, 12th, and 13th greens. One of the two streams — the Clynelish Burn — crosses the Brora Golf Club course after serving the Clynelish Distillery (just west of the A9 trunk road) as its water source for its Highland single malt whiskies, including the rare 21-year-old Scotch called “Brora”.

Brora's short (125-yard, par-3), pretty, 13th hole hides a nasty surprise: the
entrenched Clynelish Burn meanders virtually out of sight alongside the
front of the inviting green. The locals have named the hole "Snake".
Photo courtesy Brora Golf Club

          Brora links has its share of challenging and benign holes. While it deserves few of the accolades bestowed on its richly-honored neighbor, Royal Dornoch, along the same coast but one-half hour south, Brora — with club roots back to 1891 — is almost as old (14 years, well within the age of a bottle of Clynelish single malt) as the grande dame of Dornoch. Like Royal Dornoch, which was laid out by two legends of golf architecture, initially designed by Old Tom Morris with later improvements by Donald Ross, Brora is the product of a master’s hand. Already thirty years old, Brora hired the five-time Open winner James Braid to come to Northern Scotland and sculpt their pristine linksland into the course encountered today. Braid—designer of over 175 courses in Scotland, Wales, Ireland, England—clearly liked what he found at Brora and attempted to keep the course as natural as possible. That Braid’s handiwork has stood the test of time proves that Scotland’s most prolific course architect followed his own recipe for links design:

          “When a golf course is being laid out largely on sand hills at the seaside there is generally less scope for the arrangement of the holes…than there is when the ground…is…inland and…more level and less broken,…perhaps…heath, or moorland, or…meadow land. The flatter the land and the more sameness there is about it, then the more artificial has the course to be, and it follows from this that those who plan it can make and arrange it very much according to their own tastes. But when high sand hills, large open sandpits, and all the other peculiarities of the sandy wastes at some seaside places have to be dealt with, the case is different. The opportunities for laying out courses on such land are comparatively few; but such courses, it goes without saying, generally provide the best and most interesting golf, while at the same time it is both necessary and desirable that the holes should be laid out and arranged in such lengths as are suggested by the lie of the land, every natural obstacle being taken advantage of.”                                                                               —from James Braid’s 1908 book, Advanced Golf.

James Braid, 5-time winner of The
Open Championship and  ubiquitous designer of golfcourses during the
golf rush of the early 20th century
throughout the British Isles.
Photo courtesy the James Braid Society

          Braid created or altered so many courses across the British Isles (and especially in Scotland and Wales), that his influence remains very strong today while the influence of other old master designers (Willie Park, Old Tom Morris) is diminished by their relatively small remaining portfolio of work. Braid—whose career didn’t cross the ocean to America owing to his fear of travel—took on commissions grand (e.g. Glasgow’s Killermont, the Merchants of Edinburgh, and Royal Aberdeen courses all in Scotland) and common throughout the UK and Ireland, on coastal linksland (Rhyl in Wales, and Fortrose & Rosemarkie in Scotland), in the mountains of Scotland (Boat of Garten, and Taymouth Castle) and Wales (Morlais Castle), in urban environs (Royal Musselburgh in Edinburgh and Pollok in Glasgow) and in rural towns (Crieff, Scotland, and Newport, Wales), in popular resorts (Aberdovey, Wales) and on remote islands (Rothesay on Bute, Scotland, and Holyhead on Angelsey, Wales), embellishing the most pedestrian of local courses 

(Muir of Ord, Scotland) the same as he would the most of exclusive courses (Nairn, Scotland), and not hesitating to revise and improve upon established masterpieces (Royal Troon and Prestwick in Scotland, and Ballybunion in Ireland) while creating a few of his own (Blairgowrie Rosemount, Carnoustie, and Gleneagles Kings and Queens — all in Scotland) to be added to golfing’s pantheon.

          If there is no typical James Braid course, Brora Golf Club’s course, however, may be most representative of what James Braid had in mind. The great masterstroke required at Brora was restraint—not audacity—and James Braid knew better than most any of golf’s great designers when to keep his hands in his pockets. Braid left the links’s natural undulations, its meandering burns, the ragged edge of the beach, basically untouched. Instead he fit the course to the land pretty much as he found it next to the scallop of Kintradwell Bay and framed against the background of the hills of Sutherland. About one hundred sheep still roam Brora Golf Course clipping the fairways and cropping the rough (although fenced away from the greens by shin-high electrified fence). Some holes feature Hereford and Angus cattle. Animals aren’t the only moving hazards Brora. ScotRail’s Far North rail line sends a few trains daily racing past the tenth tee at Brora on their way between Inverness and Thurso and Wick at the northern end of Britain.

Not your usual golf hazard, sheep are an intrinsic feature of the natural course
at Brora. They serve to keep rough from getting rougher, but they also foul
the fairways (local rule: play sheep droppings like "ground under repair").
They do not wander the greens, which are protected by shin-high
one-strand electric fences. Here they groom the rough along
the 412-yard, par-4 "Achrimsdale Burn" hole at Brora.
Photo courtesy Brora Golf Club

          Brora may pasture some farm animals, but it is no cow pasture. Players will note the distinction immediately. A traditional out-and-back links, Brora, takes pains to keep the gentlemanly nature of turn-of-the-19th-century-golf in place. Don’t expect plus-4s and hickory shafts at Brora, but do expect a gentile manner that has not been lost or forgotten in this era of resort golf. Tradition is one pillar of this course, but there are two. The second is an abiding friendliness provided by the membership to visitors who come from around the world to sample one of Scotland’s most northerly golf courses, where in high summer the sun is still up at 9PM with golfers still on the front nine.
          The James Braid Society was organized some years ago to celebrate the life of James Braid and promote the traditional character of golf. The society takes a decidedly dim view of golf as a fashionable sport played on designer courses that draws impatient patrons with little time for the history of golf and its traditions. If all this seems more than a little repressed and backward-looking, the following statement may put a better foot forward:

“One of my favorite links is Brora on the Moray Firth, where the golfers share a precious piece of territory with a hundred or so woolly sheep. What could epitomize nature better than such a communion? I pray it will continue and last as long as the world.”

          The author of the quote was Peter Thomson, like James Braid a Five-Time Open Champion, golfing traditionalist, and founder and president of the James Braid Society, headquartered at Brora Golf Club.
 

BRORA GOLF CLUB, SUTHERLAND, NORTHERN SCOTLAND
   

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