Caledonian Dream

There is a natural wildness to golf on the Kintyre Peninsula, a long, narrow strip of land tenuously attached to the Scottish mainland by a thin slice of terrain at the village of Tarbert. The picturesque town sits at the juncture of East and West Loch Tarbert, with its lovely harbor acting as the unofficial gateway to a golfing nirvana. For certain types of golfers, the names of the Kintyre links are spoken in hushed tones of reverence: Machrihanish, Dunaverty, Machrihanish Dunes. But there is another course that deserves a place in this pantheon. While not as well-known as its more celebrated neighbors, the nine holes of Carradale Golf Club float above the Kilbrannan Sound like a Caledonian dream.

I first visited the Kintyre Peninsula in 1994, with my father. He allowed me to plan our entire 18-day itinerary, the only stipulations being that we must play the Old Course and Carnoustie. We could go wherever I wanted—and I wanted to see Machrihanish. I still remember the drive from Glasgow Airport. 

We left the city by crossing over the Clyde at the Erskine Bridge, then were awed as we pulled onto the A82, which hugs the western shore of Loch Lomond. After a sharp turn west onto the A83 at an old country hotel, there was a long, glorious stretch along Loch Fyne down to Lochgilphead and finally into Kintyre. Thinking about it now brings to mind the great English golf writer Pat Ward-Thomas, who waxed poetic about the same trip in 1960:

We left the Clyde towards evening on a golden Sunday and it was wonderful to see the traffic lessening as we came to Inverary, to know that there were still 80 miles to go and that the workaday world was receding fast. I shall not forget the magic of that drive along Loch Fyne, all gleaming silent peace, and the marvel of the sunshine dying over West Tarbert Loch, gold and purple, silver and black.

It all seemed unreal to a boy from Alabama. We stopped for lunch in Tarbert, and the sun sparkled off the harbor when we walked out of the small café. Dad and I stopped and sat on a bench for a few minutes just to admire the multicolored boats. To our left, on the hill above town, were the ruins of a castle. An hour later, we arrived in Machrihanish for five days that shaped the rest of my golfing life. Machrihanish made such an impression on me that I immediately joined the club, with the help of two friendly locals. A few years later, I became a member at nearby Dunaverty, a place I have grown to love even more. But I never heard the name Carradale mentioned during my nightly Tennent’s-fueled discussions in the old Machrihanish clubhouse bar. 

In 1997, I returned to Kintyre. After several days in Campbeltown—which included the best 95 I ever shot, in a gale at the Jimmy Kerr Open at Machrihanish—I left to catch the Claonaig-Lochranza ferry to the Isle of Arran. Against my better judgment, I took the B842, the eastern road from Campbeltown to the ferry landing. After about 40 minutes of the most winding and harrowing drive I had ever attempted, the village of Carradale appeared. A small sign for the golf club caught my attention. With just a few minutes to spare for the 10 o’clock sailing, I turned down a narrow road to find a small white clubhouse next to the first tee. The tidy, square building was unlocked. Inside, stacked neatly next to an honesty box, I found a simple white scorecard with a map of the course. I took one and walked out onto the first tee. The hole was a blind par 3, straight uphill. The ninth green sat invitingly to the right of the first tee. 

Time is precious for an American visiting Scotland. Arran and the glories of Shiskine awaited, and I had to catch my boat. On the ferry across the impossibly smooth Kilbrannan Sound, I looked back to the headlands of Port Righ, intrigued about what I might have missed. I kept the scorecard in my photo album of that trip, often taking it out to study the simple diagram of the nine-hole layout. Despite several returns to Kintyre in the intervening years, this passing stop was my only experience at Carradale.

As my dad had done for me so many years before, I took my son Jake to Scotland, in the spring of 2019. There were a few more must-haves on my list than Dad had on his: Dunaverty, Machrihanish, Shiskine and Cruden Bay, plus Prestwick, if we had time. Other than that, Jake could take us wherever he wanted. He surprised me by asking to play Anstruther, Covesea and Carradale—far from the standard choices for the first-time visitor. I could not have been happier. We drove around the east coast for several days, stopping wherever the mood took us. We played Elie in Fife, then Fraserburgh and Cullen as we moved north to Covesea. The two-week trip was to end in Kintyre and on the Isle of Arran. On a bright, clear morning, we left the Ardshiel Hotel in Campbeltown and drove the winding coastal road to Carradale.

For weeks prior to our arrival, I had corresponded with Rhona Elder, the club secretary. Then, as we progressed around Scotland, our plans changed a few times, yet she was always very cheerful and accommodating when I revised the date of our visit. Even though the remote nine-hole course would likely be empty on a May weekday morning, the formality of prior arrangements is something I respect. There was a single car in the small gravel car park when we arrived for our 9 a.m. tee time. The clubhouse had been expanded since my first visit more than two decades prior, but the charm remained. Elder bounded out to greet us.

“Mr. Hartsell? Good morning! Welcome to Carradale,” she said. “You have the course all to yourselves now.”

As we walked through a small gate to the first tee, Elder spoke again, this time in a strikingly serious tone.

“One more thing, Mr. Hartsell: The committee has met and afforded you the honor of playing off the medal tees today. Off you go. Enjoy your game.”

I was moved by this, even without the knowledge that the medal tees at Carradale are some of the most stunning in the world. On my first visit to Scotland, I had been chastised by a greenskeeper for playing off the medal tees. I did not know any better at the time. Now we had permission to play them all. It was a crisp, sunny morning. I was about to play a course in Kintyre with my son for the first time. Twenty-two years proved to be far too long a delay for Carradale.

Like Dunaverty and Tarbert down the road, Carradale was laid out by locals who just wanted a place to play. It was founded in 1906, and no earth was moved during construction. There was no reason; nature had already provided the perfect playing field.

The uphill opening par 3 that had stayed in my memory all those years proved to be an exciting start, but at the top of the hill Carradale exploded across our senses. From the elevated second tee, Kilbrannan Sound, and Arran beyond, appeared in front of us like a panorama of golf perfection. The next few holes were wonderful. It was all there: blind shots, quirky green sites benched into the sides of massive hills, hidden tees with endless vistas.

At the fourth tee, we could see Shiskine in the far distance, across the water. The mountains of Arran rose dramatically, almost defiant. We stood for a minute in respectful silence and took it all in. The next few holes were a perfect prelude to one of the great and unique ones in the world: Pudding Bowl, the par-4 sixth.

Ken Brown, a Scot, five-time European Ryder Cup player, and noted golf commentator, discovered Carradale while on holiday in the area in May 2019, just a few days before my visit with Jake. 

“Our cottage was only 50 yards from the third tee, so naturally I went to investigate, and I loved what I saw!” Brown later told me. “I bumped into Robert, the head greenskeeper, and enjoyed chatting with him about how he maintained the course.” 

Pudding Bowl was Brown’s favorite hole on the course. “The tee box was elevated, and the views it gave you of the hole and the sea behind you were just incredible,” he said. “My favorite part of the hole was how the small green was set into the side of the hill and how that affected your strategy off the tee.”

The hole, depending on the tee, is no more than 306 yards. As Jake and I discovered, the tee shot must carry a corner of Port Righ Bay and the beach. It presents a decision: How much should one cut off over the beach and rough, bog-like ground covered in tall fescue? Key to the hole’s brilliant strategic design, the green is angled in such a way that it opens itself only to golfers who have taken the boldest lines from the tee. In our round, the trade-off was that the carry for our drives got increasingly longer.

The green complex is sort of a punchbowl, but not quite. It dawned on me that this is probably why it was dubbed Pudding Bowl. A wire fence on the fringe keeps livestock from trampling the grass. A sense of pleasant isolation from the rest of the course can be felt on the sixth’s elongated and cloistered green. An aggressive approach shot can be played off the slopes on three sides, funneling the ball onto the narrow putting surface cut into the top of a rocky mound. Bluebells, heather and gorse frame the scene and can show off violet, deep purple and yellow, depending on the season.

It is subjective to claim that a golf hole is unique. Then and now, I can say only that I have never played another one like the sixth at Carradale. It was the highlight of Jake’s and my day and a hole I would constantly bring up to my golfing friends for years afterward.

On a cool, windy morning in April 2023, one of those golfing friends finally made me show him what all my fussing was about. I left Dunaverty Rock in a rented Škoda Octavia, with my friend Todd Schuster (aka Tron Carter of No Laying Up) in the passenger seat. We planned to take our time driving up to Oban, stopping for nine holes at Carradale along the way. A right turn at the Glen Scotia distillery in Campbeltown put us on that long, serpentine road I had first driven in 1997. The B842 climbs up quickly to the hills above town, past beautiful old mansions from the halcyon days of the whisky industry. As we passed the island of Davaar, with sheep cascading down the verdant slopes to the sea, I was thankful that the road had been improved since 2019. Our conversation was the excited banter of golfers anticipating a special day.

We arrived to find the car park empty and the clubhouse unlocked. (I hope the world never reaches the point where doors must be locked in this place.) There was nothing but vast blue above us and the yellow, green and purple landscape in front. Cows grazed idly in the fields adjacent to the ninth fairway. I went inside to place our £15 greens fee in the honesty box. The excitement from my friend was palpable as we strolled through the narrow wooden gate to the first tee. I told him to wait until he saw the second hole.

“You get to the top of that hill and it’s like, ‘Holy shit!’ It’s something out of a fairy tale,” Schuster later told me. “You kind of get hit in the face with those views, but then you realize that this is a real golf course, too. That second hole is brilliant—down the hill and over the stone wall back up to that almost infinity green. It sets the tone for the round.”

From the fifth green—itself a wonder of golf architecture, carved into the side of a steep hill—it was a long walk back to the medal tee on Pudding Bowl. We traversed a narrow uphill footpath through rabbit holes, heather, gorse, fescue and all forms of natural Scottish vegetation. Standing on that tee was like being on top of the world. 

From where we stood, the hole was about 300 yards—a mere choked-down 3-wood for Rory McIlroy, but the perfect length for normal golfers. From the medal tee, the fairway appeared to sit somewhat perpendicular to the line of play, although it was actually angled sharply to the right.

Schuster had the honor but was 1 down in our match. A long hitter, he went for the heroic line toward the green. The wind was into us. It was a perfect strike. 

Later, he’d laugh as he recalled the moment: “That was one of the best shots I hit on the whole trip! It was like picking your poison, deciding how far left to go. You were playing great in the match, so I felt like I had to go for it. That tee box is as spectacular as it gets. It’s the first picture I show people when I’m telling them about Carradale.”

I played safely to the right and found the fairway. The angle into the green was not ideal, but I was in play. We never found Schuster’s ball. The match ultimately went 2 up in my favor.

“That green site is probably the best one I played last year, along with a couple at Dunaverty and Machrihanish,” Schuster said. “There is that little fence around the green. It’s totally nuts. It is truly one of those holes where you are thinking,‘This can’t possibly exist.’ You would never build something like that today. Honestly, it doesn’t look like something that would get built 100 years ago—and I mean that in a good way.”

Schuster has experienced golf all over the world, so it was a delight to watch someone who has played the likes of Royal Melbourne, Pine Valley and Cypress Point light up while walking around a remote nine-hole course on the Kilbrannan Sound that charged him £25 for a daylong ticket. 

“The Pudding Bowl can either hurt you or help you, depending on what kind of bounce you get,” he said. “The way it sits there in the land is just so cool. It’s so unique to be on a nine-hole course and feel so secluded from the rest of the property. Carradale is one of my favorite places I’ve ever been.”

It was a reminder that golf in its simplest form can be as transcendent as the most celebrated cathedrals in the sport.

Jake lives about an hour from me and my wife now, in Alabama. We get to play golf occasionally, usually with my other son, Jonathan. I do not see either of my boys as much as I would like. Children grow up, we hope and pray as parents, and live their own lives. I have several photos of Jake from that 2019 trip on my office wall. They are from Carradale, Shiskine, Covesea, Anstruther and Cullen, the lesser-known courses that are the hidden treasures of golf in Scotland. We mostly stay in touch these days through short, random, usually humorous text messages about things we both love: “Richard and Linda Thompson are underrated” or “Patrick Cantlay is a frozen statue” or “I can’t stand watching Purdue play basketball.”

Several months ago, Jake and I started planning another trip to Scotland together. Late one night, I was in bed when a message popped up on my phone: “The sixth at Carradale is my favorite hole in golf.”  •