Revelations from
the Rim of the World
Brora Golf Club
Brora, Scotland
Greens fee: £140
Date played: October 7, 2024
The ninth green at Brora Golf Club sits at latitude 58 degrees north, two minutes, and 7.3 seconds. Directly east, the same parallel runs through southern Sweden and passes 160 miles north of Moscow. Westward, the parallel moves across northeastern Canada’s Hudson Bay and through Juneau, Alaska.
Brora isn’t the only Scottish course with wild land movement and great bunker placement. But it frequently marries the two: placing bunkers into the swales, opening up wild possibilities even if an approach shot narrowly clears a trap.
The green marks Brora’s northernmost point, perched just above the Moray Firth, separated from the beach by little more than a strip of native grass. To its left, a sand trap guarding the high side of the ninth hole’s two-tiered green, and a walking path to the 10th teebox. To the green’s right, nothing but the North Sea until you hit Norway. It is closer to the North Pole than it is to Boston.
It is the farthest north on this planet I’ve ever been.
There is something wistful about the Scottish Highlands — nearly sad, but not quite; beautiful, but lonely. Nowhere more so than here. On a cold, windy day, with grey clouds looming overhead and east Sutherland’s ancient hills in the distance, the ninth green’s perch looks like the oldest place in the world — the firstborn of all creation, its age laid fully bare without even a year unmarked. Yet it is also damp and green and alive and renewed, suffering the unceasing waves but enduring them.
It is an easy place to feel small and momentary. But it also is an easy place to feel at peace and part of something eternal. There is a fine line between them. Brora straddles it. I’d come to Scotland looking for something — a revelation, maybe. Something wild and undiscovered; primal, essential. A place closer to God, if He’s out there somewhere.
I didn’t know it until I saw it, but I’d been looking for Brora all along.
. . .
You know that you’re on a journey, rather than a mere vacation, when you set your alarm at night. Mine went off at 6:30 a.m. Dull, grey clouds held back the sunrise in Golspie, a small Highlands town where I’d spent two nights and played its James Braid-designed golf course the day before. Rain pattered against my bedroom’s cold windowpane. I fumbled for my phone and snuffed out the alarm. It was Monday morning. I’d be leaving soon.
This way to an all-timer.
The bed and breakfast that I’d called home for the past 36 hours had been everything that I’d needed: a quiet room, a clean bed, a hot shower, and more breakfast than you could stuff into an airplane carry-on. And the town’s famous golf course, while not the greatest four hours of my life, had been eye-opening. But I was ready to move on. One round of golf at Golspie had been enough for this trip, and I couldn’t drop in the chip shop again without hearing from my cardiologist.
British food gets a bad rep. It’s predictable. But it’s a little like Boston’s Greatest Hits: sure, it’s the same song over and over, but I like that song. Dinner is fried meat and fried carbs. More importantly, so is the full Scottish breakfast: bacon (more like thick ham), sausage, eggs, haggis, pan-simmered mushrooms, sliced tomatoes, and baked beans. “Would you like to start with cereal,” my host asked, “or move straight to breakfast?” Any country that treats cereal as an appetizer is my kind of place. I graciously accepted a bowl of Frosted Flakes and a French press of coffee for the first 400 hundred of my 2,000-calorie jumpstart.
A few minutes after 9, I thanked my hosts and headed out the door, suitcase and travel golf bag in tow. It was raining, but the Scotrail station was only a two-minute walk. After a short wait under an overhang, the train pulled into the station on time. Ten minutes later, I was in Brora, the northernmost port on my journey.
Even by Scotland’s standards, Brora’s combination of small-town charm and top-notch golf would be tough to beat.
Brora is a more charming town than hardscrabble Golspie. The River Brora, which forms from the convergence of two smaller streams 10 miles to the northwest, meanders through the center of town and finishes its journey to the sea at Brora Beach, a 6-iron south of the golf course’s first tee. Coffee shops, bakeries, homes, and gardens line the A9, and a 50-foot stone memorial bearing the names of Brora’s war dead overlooks the river. And a 10-minute walk from the Scotrail station, the small town’s revelation of a golf course. The town would have to wait. Early or not, it was time to head to the course.
After checking in, and with time to spare before teeing off, I headed upstairs to the clubhouse restaurant for a cup of coffee and a muffin to shake off the cold and rain. But I spent nearly every minute gawking at the 18th green — a long, sadistic par-3 (201 yards from the back white tees, 190 yards from the middle yellow tees) with a a cavernous, 40-yards-long swale fronting the green, bunkers right and a steep falloff to the left, and an inhumane false front. I couldn’t take my eyes off it, long after I’d drained my coffee.
But tee times wait for no one. After about 10 minutes of putting and another five of bashing irons into a practice net, I headed to the first tee to meet my caddie, wind and rain be damned.
. . .
When golf architecture minimalists lecture the masses on finding a piece of ground and letting it speak for itself, Brora is what they mean. It is a masterclass in an architect not getting in their own way: nine holes straight up the beach and nine holes back to the clubhouse, with just enough back-nine routing inland as needed to stay out of the front nine’s way. With the wind roaring inland off the water, the first nine holes square players up against the wind from right-to-left; after the turn, the back nine marches players back toward town with the wind now testing shots from left-to-right. All 18 holes roll over Brora’s unending swales, rumples, and dunes. If links golf began on wind-blown sand, lightly shaped by sea breezes over who knows how long, then Brora shows that those shapes tell you most of what you need to know about the neighboring water. And the sea breeze at Brora is a puncher.
Swales and dunes aren’t Brora’s only memorable features: Highland cows and sheep graze throughout the course, including this herd on the course’s homeward nine.
At the second hole, I met Brora’s famous livestock — a herd of Scottish cows helping themselves to the taller grass to the left of the fairway. I posed for a photo while trying not to get too close; I’ve read too many stories about tourists getting gored by buffalo at national parks. Maybe I should’ve stayed with them, because after a couple of handshake holes to open the round, Brora lets loose.
The par-4 third (447 yards from both the white and yellow tees) is perhaps Brora’s toughest: straight as an arrow from tee to green, but traveling across obscene undulations, with a deep swale dividing the two halves of the long fairway. One of Brora’s uncommonly tame greens is the hole’s only respite.
The fifth (428 yards from the white tees, 418 from the yellows) is another long par-4, but this time at full-throated madness. The Clyne Burn cuts across the fairway about 170 yards from the green, forcing all but the longest hitters to lay up and accept a mid-iron approach to a bunkerless green with a huge ridge dividing its left from its right.
And then, at the sixth, Brora comes off its hinges. The course’s first par-3, with its medium length (190 yards from the white tees, 164 from the yellows), doesn’t look like much on the scorecard. But three bunkers guard against anything short of the green: a fever dream with two ridges — one in back, one on the left — pouring down toward a perilous thumbprint on the right side. The seventh is more of the same: a medium-length par-4 (350 yards from the white tees, 340 yards from the yellows) with two dicey obstacles confronting the player along the way: a ridge cutting across some 150 yards from the green, and the burn crossing the line of play at an awkward 72 yards from the green. After hooking my approach to the left edge of the Biarritz green, my long putt hit the swale and veered left to right so hard it’d make J.D. Vance blush. My ball nestled two feet away from the hole, and somehow, I walked away with my second par in a row.
. . .
God is at Brora, I’m convinced. I know because I felt Him.
“Pulp Fiction” has more to say about spirituality than any other film during my lifetime. In the penultimate scene, John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson’s characters discuss an improbable occurrence, which Travolta chalks up to luck (“That means God came down from Heaven and stopped the bullets?”) — while Jackson credits divine intervention (“That’s exactly what it means. God came down from Heaven and stopped these motherfucking bullets.”)
“Whether what we experienced was an according-to-Hoyle miracle is insignificant,” Jackson says. “What is significant is I felt the touch of God. God got involved.”
For more than 20 years, God was likelier to get involved with me on a golf course than elsewhere. I felt it the first time I saw Augusta National, when my mother and I watched the first fairway open in front of us. “It looks like Heaven,” she said. I felt Him on the 18th tee at Pebble Beach, posing for a photograph with my wife, who was three months pregnant with our first son. I’ve felt Him on the fourth green at Sweetens Cove and in the pouring rain at Cruden Bay. For more than 20 years, I was much more likely to feel God on a golf course or at a baseball game than in a sanctuary, drifting between hopeful agnosticism and outright nihilism. Heck, where else are those schools of thought intersected so intensely as on a golf course?
Some people come to God via the Road to Damascus — a singular, brain-rearranging moment where the goodness of Almighty God Creator of Heaven and Earth pours in and changes their life forever. That sounds nice. It would be much more convincing than a black book and a bunch of unanswerable “but then why…?” questions. About a year ago, though, something occurred to me: that, maybe, neither agnosticism nor unanswerable questions were inconsistent with faith. Skepticism that a giant, translucent old man lives somewhere in the clouds is not inconsistent with the command of a servant to feed the hungry and give to the needy. There is nothing inconsistent about doubting that a whale swallowed Jonah and looking out for your neighbor.
So I started going back to church. God gets involved there, of course. But there’s nothing inconsistent between that and God getting involved at a golf course, either. As far as I’m concerned, He does both. As in “Pulp Fiction,” if you feel it, then it’s there. And I defy anyone to stand on Brora’s ninth green and not feel it.
. . .
By the time my caddie and I made the turn, the dull grey clouds were all that remained of the morning rain. “If that’s all we’re gonna get,” I said, “then I say we got lucky.”
“Don’t say that,” he admonished with a chuckle. “The weather gods will hear you.”
On a slope overlooking Brora’s homeward nine, sheep have rutted exposures into the ground — the earliest forms of bunkering on raw links land.
A Scottish caddie’s local knowledge is never wrong. Within 20 minutes, the clouds had darkened a shade, and the rain returned. The bigger issue, though, was the wind — now blowing left to right for the homeward nine, with rain to match. The sheep didn’t seem to mind. They’d wandered in from the neighboring ranch and spent all morning shitting all over the place, as they’ve probably been doing for a hundred years. How much shit can a flock drop on a golf course over the span of a hundred years? Whatever it is, no insignificant portion thereof littered the ground.
What makes Brora wonderful is not just the land’s incredible undulations. It’s the way that the golf course presents that land in different ways on every hole. Sometimes, the land looks like the surface of a stormy bay. Other times, it’s full of gullies like a bowl of pudding with a handful of fingers dragged through it. Sometimes, the land’s movement challenges players from tee to green; other times, the routing keeps the ground’s most severe rolls for its greens. Brora takes off no holes, and none of its holes repeat themselves.
My caddie and I kept routing our way through the sheep shit to the 14th — which, perhaps more than any other hole on the course, distills everything great about Brora. The burn cuts across the fairway about 90 yards out from the green, which can’t be seen from the tee box. The result is that players not only must choose between an aggressive or safe tee shot, while navigating toward a hidden target.
My tee shot found a different target. The slice that had stalked me at Golspie the day before suddenly reappeared, with the left-to-right wind urging it on. My drive started over the fairway before looping rightward and diving down, down, down…straight into a sheep. The animal jolted in shock and galloped away quicker than I thought a sheep could move.
“I think I hit one,” I told my caddie.
“It can’t be too bad,” he said. “You can only hit one at a time.”
Brora’s breathtaking finale: the 18th green, viewed from its righthand side. A false front pours down into a huge gully in front of the green (on the left side of this photo), with very little safety to offer aside from a well placed tee shot.
After walking off the 17th hole’s thumbprint green with a grateful bogey, we arrived at a hole that had slacked my jaw when I first saw it hours earlier from the clubhouse restaurant. On a course full of surprises, Brora saves its most hallucinatory fever dream for last: a long par-3 (201 yards from the white tees, 190 yards from the yellows) to a green surrounded by trouble, set in a bowl on its right side and perched atop a clifftop on its left.
Before reaching that trouble, though, getting to the green is not small task. The tee shot must cover a huge hollow, maybe 15 feet from its bottom to the edge of the green — that is, to the edge of a huge false front. Anything short of that false front’s crest will roll all the way down, essentially imposing at least a one-stroke penalty and leaving the penalized player with a brutal wedge shot that must fly nearly straight up and still reach the back of the green to avoid rolling down again. Long and left aren’t much better, with runoffs of their own own. Depending on the pin location, the best play is to the right side of the green; although it’s guarded by two bunkers, shots from either trap won’t bring the green’s false front into play. And if you can land your shot between the traps, then even better: the ball will release down the slope lazily onto the green.
That’s the play I tried. It didn’t work; my slice gave me one last stab in the back, and the tee shot leaked toward one of the bunkers on the green’s right side, plugging in the wet sand. Digging it out was like trying to pull a kettlebell out of half-dried cement. I don’t remember what my score was. It didn’t matter. I’ve since thought of a dozen different ways I might try playing the hole, including putting the tee shot down into the hollow and then bumping a fairway wood all the way up to the green. The truth is that the safest play is just to hit it close. But next time, I might try the putter thing anyway.
. . .
The River Tain flows through the center of town, eastward past the links to the sea, barely a half-mile away.
The rain had nearly stopped by the time I left the 18th. Back in the clubhouse restaurant, I found a seat close to the window wall. I plowed through a sandwich and nursed a Tennent, looking down on the 18th green the whole time. By the time I emptied my glass, I was no closer to solving the 18th’s puzzle than when I’d stood on the tee.
I walked back downstairs, retrieved my suitcase and travel bag from the pro shop, thanked a couple of staff that I passed on my way out, and walked back up Golf Road toward the center of town. Brora is a town worth exploring, worth returning to, and not just for the golf course. I spent an hour or so walking toward the southern end of town, past cottages and gardens, but eventually, pulling both a suitcase and a travel golf bag got old, and I wandered back to the Scotrail station where I’d arrived that morning.
The train car was nearly empty when I boarded. I took the liberty of changing into dry socks and tennis shoes, then watched the grey sky slowly grow dim as the train rolled south. It would be dark by the time I reached Tain.
. . .
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