Old Tom Morris secured his place in golf history by standardizing courses at 18 holes. On South Uist, an island off the northwest coast of Scotland, his legacy will be legal disputes and an impasse that’s divided the community.
Three years ago, residents of the 32km long island uncovered a Morris-designed layout that had been overgrown and unplayed for 70 years. While golfers celebrated the discovery of a long-lost shrine, business owners envisaged a lure to bring customers on the eight-hour trek from Glasgow.
Others saw a land grab. After the Askernish Golf Club spent £75,000 (US$120,000) to rebuild the 19th-century course, which includes quirks such as a two-tier putting green, farmers who had grazed sheep and cows on the land went to court to stop the project. A hearing may come next month. For now, each side avoids the other. At Sheila MacCormick’s hotel, golfers drink in the lounge while their opponents stick to the public bar.
PHOTO: BLOOMBERG
“It’s an argument that’s carried on and carried on and carried on,” MacCormick said. “It’s too far gone for somebody to say, ‘Let it go.’”
Morris, who died in 1908 at the age of 86, is still the oldest ever winner of the British Open, an event he captured four times. He built 70 courses, and the 18th hole at the 600-year-old St Andrews’ Old Course is named after him.
South Uist’s 1,800 residents have been divided since Gordon Irvine, a former British greenskeeper of the year, stumbled across the old course in 2005. Before that, the local club played a flat, featureless nine-hole layout, where members dropped a £20 note into an old Royal Mail box before each round.
The club convinced Storas Uibhist, which owns the land on behalf of the region, that Old Tom’s handiwork should be restored and pledged volunteer labor.
“It’s like God made a golf course,” said Malcolm Peake, a UK writer on golf-course management who helped organize donations.
The course may bring in almost £1.1 million a year in greens fees and hotel and restaurant spending by 2012, Storas Uibhist said. Annual tourism spending on the island and neighboring Benbecula is £10 million, or 16 percent of GDP.
“It’s something for people to come across for,” said MacCormick, manager of the 14-room Borrodale Hotel, just a loch and a few sheep farms from the course. “We’ve always had a golf course, but nobody knew about it.”
A handful of local farmers, known as crofters, say the course intrudes on their right to use the land as pasture. In February, a half-dozen sought a ruling from Scottish Land Court, which resolves farming disputes.
“That’s what those bastards are trying to take from us, security of tenure,” said Willie MacDonald, 53, who leads the group that wants to graze livestock on the course year-round.
MacDonald, who drinks Famous Grouse whisky and rolls his own cigarettes, sees the conflict in historic terms. He likens golfing tourists to the 19th-century dandies who consulted their tailors for outfits as they pretended to be country folk on South Uist, then Lady Gordon Cathcart’s deer-stalking, shooting and fishing estate.
Opponents doubt the course was actually designed by “Old Tom” and say golfers are merely using that speculation as a way to push them off the land. Last October, police were called in after someone vandalized the greens.
“If Old Tom had come to Askernish, people would have remembered,” said MacDonald, a part-time crofter who makes his living as a builder. “It’s not a restoration. It’s nothing but supposition, surmise and assumption.”
Club members counter that they’ve found so much proof of the Old Tom connection that they know the first foursome who teed off in 1891 — a banker, a hotel owner, a farm manager and Lady Cathcart’s agent. Evidence includes stories from the time in Golf magazine and the Scotsman newspaper, as well as maps.
Donald MacInnes, the club captain and also a crofter, said sheep are permitted on the course in the winter, but not cows.
The course was rebuilt without bulldozers, irrigation or pesticides. Bunkers grow out of old rabbit holes and sheep shelters, as they did in Morris’ day. The bumpy greens probably won’t smooth out until they’ve been treated with sand and seaweed for a few years.
“I’m not sure it’s possible to develop a golf course in a more environmentally friendly manner,” said Steve Isaac, golf course management director for the Royal & Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, which governs the game outside the US and Mexico and organizes the British Open.
Golfers face challenges typical of a 19th-century course, such as blind shots and multiple routes to the hole, said Martin Ebert, who helped rebuild the course and was paid the same £9 fee Morris got in the 1890s.
Askernish’s remoteness — it’s as far north as Juneau, Alaska — may add to its allure among those who like to brag about visiting “really special, obscure courses,” said John Garrity, a golf writer for Sports Illustrated who’s written, only half-jokingly, that Askernish is the best course on the planet. An annual membership for non-island residents costs £125.
At summer’s height, golfers can play until midnight, while the course is protected from the worst of the winter by the warming waters of the Gulf Stream. Then there’s the wind, which has helped keep the course record on a par-72 course at 77.
“You go out there in bad weather, you think you’re going to get blown off the face of the Earth,” Garrity said.
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