Royal Dornoch - Scotland

Our trip across Scotland reached its zenith at Royal Dornoch.

Physically we were now within eight degrees of the Arctic Circle - north of Moscow as the locals like to say. And romantically, we were at the spiritual home of the game.

I don't know if Michael Murphy wrote Golf in the Kingdome with this as a backdrop, but he should have.

If I were to pick one course to play the rest of my days, it might well be the tranquil and treacherous Royal Dornoch Golf Club.

This is the best course not to hold a British Open, too short and too far away.

And yet in the ranking of golf courses in the U.K., Dornoch is No. 3 behind only Royal County Down in Northern Ireland and Murfield in Scotland. Ranked ahead of the Old Course, Turnberry, Ballybunion and even Trump International.

"Best in the world," is what they say if you ask, but there is a minimum of talk and boasting here, simply a reverence for the game in a setting that is serene and subtle.

I realized there is nothing really new in golf architecture, that what designers are doing with the new links courses like Bandon Dunes had already done by Old Tom Morris in the late 1880s, and polished by Donald Ross, who as a young man was the club's first professional and first greenskeeper.

Ross, of course, went on to design hundreds of course in the U.S., including Pinehurst No. 2.

The course doesn't threaten you off the tee, the longest of the par 3s was 167 yards, and yet you'd better be prepared to play the ball here to get it there, to use the firmness of the course rather than complain about it.

There is nothing pretentious about the place. Guests are welcomed by Roderick, the starter, who is wearing kilts even on a cold and breezy morning.

He reminds us that Tom Watson had said the second hole held for us the most difficult second shot in golf.

I expected it to be a wicked par 4 and got a table-top, 167-yard par 3 instead. Playing down wind, it took a 150-yard shot to the front of the green. I did that, but the ball veered suddenly off the green and down a steep bank. A similar fate befell a shot hit left or long.

As I putted straight back up the 10-foot high bank on my second shot I understood what Watson was talking about.

It was Watson who said the three rounds he played in 24 hours here were "the most fun I've ever had playing golf."

I often wondered where golfers went to die.

We met two different groups of members who weren't from around here, one from Vancouver, Canada and the other from San Francisco.

In each case, they came over to play for a month in May and returned for another month in September. They rented cottages in the village, played 36 holes a day in the gathering daylight of May and the falling daylight of September.

You'd need a special appreciation for the game, to deal with the distance - 500 miles north of London - and the cool, breezy weather.

To become members they had to join the lesser - Struie course for two years - but were then eligible to play the championship course for about $700 a year. A single round in the summer is $150.

There are 1,800 members at Royal Dornoch, 1,500 of them from outside Scotland.

Besides their play at Royal Dornoch they can play the nearby courses of Brora, Golspie, and Tain for $15 a round, plus get reciprocals with other ``Royal'' courses around the world, including Royal Colwood in Victoria.

Brora is the course tended by sheep and where they protect the greens with short electric fences. Tain is in the town where they distill Glenmorangie single malt whiskey and where the first hole is played over a road and a fence.

Everything in Scotland is ``lovely,'' according to those who live here, but Royal Dornoch really is.

About to send us off, Roderick was willing to tell us his favorite story as the club starter.

"The Canadian, Mike Weir, was playing here and hit his tee shot into the hotel," said Roderick. "He wanted a mulligan; I told him he was playing three. He hit the next tee shot on the green (a 331-yard hole) made the putt and gave me a digital gesture."