Niall:
Thanks for posting this; it brought back some great memories of my round at Inverallochy several years ago.
In my view, Inverallochy is -- symbolically, in some ways, but still legitimately so -- one of the truly important historic sites in the history of the game.
Golf, in its earliest days of developing across the Scottish land, was really a game of the very wealthy, and therefore limited in its participation. That was largely due to the cost of the game, namely the equipment and most particularly the cost of the ball -- the feathery. Featheries were (relatively) expensive to make, expensive to buy, and fell apart quite easily. Only those with the means to buy many featheries could take up the game, and thus in its early days the game was limited to pockets of wealth in the country -- around Edinburgh and Glasgow, Perth, coastal communities where trade was prominent (Aberdeen), and of course St. Andrews and Fife, long one of the wealthiest corners of Scotland.
The gutta percha -- introduced in mid-19th century, and the most important technological development in the history of the game -- changed all that. Suddenly a cheap and durable ball made the game affordable and accessible to nearly everyone. Growth in the game exploded, and for the next 50 years or so, clubs and courses were developed in nearly every corner of the country. Among those corners was the tiny fishing village of Inverallochy. Founders of the club used a spit of land ideal for links golf, and fashioned a traditional out-and-back course in which the golfers playing there became quite proficient, as Niall's story attests. The success of the Inverallochy golfers, described in Niall's story, would be the equivalent of some small community in a tiny corner of the United States developing enough good golfers to hold their own against Euro's latest Ryder Cup team.
Technology continued to lead to improvements in the game, including the introduction of the Haskell ball around the turn of the century. Most golfers of course abandoned the old gutta percha for the newer ball that flew longer and straighter. But not the golfers at Inverallochy; there were among the last golfers in Scotland to foresake the "guttie" for the newer, improved ball.
I always thought their allegiance to the old ball, in a small but significant way, symbolized what the game is truly like in Scotland -- it's really the national sport, played or followed in some way by nearly everyone. It became that way in part due to the innovation of the gutta percha. And the reluctance of the golfers of the little fishing village on the northeastern shoulder of Scotland to give it up demonstrates -- at least for me -- what the game meant to them in the first place.