I love Askernish with a passion. I was very, very lucky that, during February 2006, Martin Ebert, who I only knew vaguely at the time, called me and invited me to go up to Uist the following month with him, Gordon Irvine and Chris Haspell (now super at Castle Stuart) to investigate the possibility of reinstating the course.
In March, I took a stupidly early flight to Glasgow in order to connect with the morning plane to Benbecula. It was snowing when we boarded the plane, which didn't bode well for a trip to the islands, but as we flew across the coast, the skies cleared, and we crossed Skye and the Minch with barely a cloud below us. We descended across Uist into Benbecula airport, with the lochans glinting in the sunlight, and were met off the plane by Ralph Thompson.
Ralph drove us straight to the site. Passing Askernish House and coming onto the machair, we all wondered what exactly we had come here for: the land was links to be sure, but fairly flat, with a _very_ basic golf green (the final green of the nine hole course then in play) surrounded by barbed wire, in front of us.
We drove out towards the water's edge, and, at the place where the seventh tee now sits, we had our epiphany. And then, we spent two magical days, brilliantly sunny though brutally cold, trudging through the dunes, trying to locate evidence of old golf holes and figuring out a routing for the course. The routing that Martin produced at the end of those two days has been fairly dramatically changed, but it's still the essence of the course.
I have only been back once since, with golf architects James Edwards and Forrest Richardson in tow, but hardly a day passes when I don't think of Askernish.
BUT
The course exists because a number of talented and far-sighted people - including but not limited to Gordon, Martin, Chris, David Withers, Mike Keiser, Tom Doak, Eric Iverson and others - were prepared to invest time, skill and money in it, with no prospect of a commercial return, and a number of writers, people like John Garrity, have helped to make the place better known. I will defend the sustainability of the Askernish project to the end, because, as I said on here a couple of days ago, so long as there are a small number of people on the island sufficiently interested in golf to keep mowing it, there will be a course there; and the stark, remote beauty of the place will always attract a number of visitors.
It is hard, though, to see how a course built by volunteers with donated equipment and located in a spot that, while more accessible than most might think, is relatively speaking the end of the earth, could be held up as any kind of model for the game or the industry as a whole. The Platonic form of golf, perhaps; but Plato is no model for today's society with good reason.