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Durness: the Course at Cape Wrath

Durness: the Course at Cape Wrath

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Tim Blessing
Aug 02, 2022
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Durness: the Course at Cape Wrath
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I was standing in the golf shop at Tain, a marvelous Old Tom Morris course near Dornoch, and the weather outside was so bad that navy cutters would have heeled to port. And there was a competition scheduled and grandmothers and great-grandmother’s were putting on their rain gear and getting ready to play. I, as the officially designated “soft” American, had no desire to go out after I had had to literally wade across the parking lot. And so I was standing in the golf shop, talking to the attendant.

I mentioned playing Durness a year earlier.

He bristled. 

“Durness,” he said, “is a cult.”

And, I must admit, I am a cult member. Durness is almost a Scottish golf fantasy, all but walled off from the rest of Scottish golf by the sheer number of obstacles to getting there.  Most people use the NC500, a road which twists 500 miles along the top of mainland Scotland and along the North Sea and the north Atlantic and, eventually, into Durness itself. The NC500 is grand for a road that is often sin…

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