Blackheath Common

[Colin Sheehan]

In the NLE topic, I mentioned I would have loved to play the old seven hole course on Blackheath Common. I wonder if it is one of the few NLE of significance that is just laying there. I can't imagine anyone altered the features when it was abandoned in 1923. Perhaps somewhere some grading was made but I like that this can be walked and you can really approximate the original course. And is there any day where hickory golfers can replay it? That would be interesting. Perhaps that becomes a thing.

I remember once driving through the common with Chris Surmonte about 24 years ago. I knew in that moment it was historic golf ground, but I never thought about looking at the precise routing until today.

So check it out.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/GDYZ5ZJPPdKGpAQ37
 
PS. The endeavor was worth it to re-read the Darwin passage. He is the GOAT!

[Colin Sheehan]

Darwin's reviews of Blackheath and Bude & North Cornwell share similar references to congestion dangers on mixed-used commons. Blackheath's demise is foreshadowed in Darwin's marvelous way.

In Blackheath and Bude, Darwin makes a refence to "nursery maids," and the sentence in the Bude portion is one of the best in the book: "When we have paid for the windows and buried the nursery maids, we play quite a short but deceptive iron shot to the seventeenth, avoiding a bunker and a sandy road, and so home with a good two-shot hole to end with." 

[Tom_Doak]

Colin:


I think Darwin also fretted about beach-goers at North Berwick; thankfully, they know enough golf to not have been killed in appreciable numbers over the past 115 years.


Do you have yardages for the two long holes?  In Darwin's description one of them was clearly a par-6 for hickories, or maybe even a par-7, and the next "not quite so much so".  But I don't know that the club even had a scorecard of the course, and Darwin did not list yardages.

[Colin Sheehan]

Tom,

Here's a link to the original seven hole map.
https://photos.app.goo.gl/y3vWi5tUwbQiustX6

The two long holes were 540 and 500.

1 - 7 was:
170
335
380
540
500
230
410

[Colin Sheehan]

I love this quote from Darwin: "To play three rounds over Blackheath on a cold, blustery winter's day is a man's task."

[Tony_Muldoon]

Colin, somewhere on here I reported in 2008 when they had a big event where the course was 'recreated' to celebrate 400 years of golf on the common.  Sky sent a camera, and teams including Neil Coles (IIRC) etc. competed on a Sunday morning with Hickories. Even surrounded by Heras fencing, they couldn't recreate any meaningful routing.


Changes were made as the road became busier etc.  The old gravel pits and various dips were filled with bomb damage rubble in WW11.  I think it's in the British Golf Society Magazine Through the Green (available online), where the changes and various routing are described best, but the older Club History also does it.


My mother now resides in Blackheath and I get to cross the course weekly.

[Tom_Doak]

For those who have not read it, here is a link to the text:


https://www.gutenberg.org/files/44623/44623-h/44623-h.htm#illo_089


And here is the passage I was remembering . . . one of the great descriptions of any golf course ever:


"After the third we are confronted with the two long holes, and the piling up of our score begins. It is now some time since I played them, and they are, besides, too long to describe in detail. I have a vision of reaching, after several shots on the flat, a deep hollow on the left, and spending some further time in hacking the ball along its hard and inhospitable turf, finally to emerge on to the flat again and reach the green in a score verging upon double figures. The fifth hole may be described as the same, only not quite so much so, and the round ends with two holes of a somewhat milder character, but neither of them in the least easy. Then off we go over the pit again for our second round, and there is yet another one left to play. To play three rounds over Blackheath on a cold, blustery winter’s day is a man’s task."

[Adam Lawrence]

From time to time, I daydream about writing Bernardo's biography. Then I read him again, and I thrash myself with a cleek for presumptuousness.

[Niall C]

From time to time, I daydream about writing Bernardo's biography. Then I read him again, and I thrash myself with a cleek for presumptuousness.

I think you over-clubbed there. A mashie niblick would have done.


Niall

[Colin Sheehan]

Tony,


Thank you for that info about festivities in 2008.


That make sense about the gravel pits being filled in, etc. From the google street view images, the common does look quite flat but that's always a little misleading.


Too bad there can't be annual game on the links, like a Hogmanay celebration, where the common returns to a golf course for half a day each year. I do look forward to trying to make a quick diversion to walk it on the next visit to London.


I did something similar in Leith once and it was interesting to imagine what the golf may have been like.

[Colin Sheehan]

Going back to the Darwin text, I also love this line: "...as we hack our ball along with a driving mashie out of a hard and flinty lie, narrowly avoiding the slaughter of a passing pedestrian, we feel that we are on hallowed ground."

I personally love his use of flinty since I imagine he's using it by its definition as "stern, unyielding" and because six of the seven holes played over the three gravel pits. I wonder if shots from them off tight, rocky lies occasionally induced sparks at impact.

[Adam Lawrence]

That sentence is interesting. It contains _five_ adjectives, something no editor would tolerate today (my first editor taught me that ‘the adjective is the enemy of the noun’, which is to say that if you’re using a lot of adjectives you probably aren’t using interesting enough nouns). Those were different times. Yet it is his diction that makes it so beautiful: the two most evocative words in it are ‘flinty’ (Colin is right) and ‘hack’.

[Tom_Doak]

That sentence is interesting. It contains _five_ adjectives, something no editor would tolerate today (my first editor taught me that ‘the adjective is the enemy of the noun’, which is to say that if you’re using a lot of adjectives you probably aren’t using interesting enough nouns). Those were different times. Yet it is his diction that makes it so beautiful: the two most evocative words in it are ‘flinty’ (Colin is right) and ‘hack’.

Imagine being Darwin's editor -- how dare you!  [Did he really have one?]

[Adam Lawrence]

That sentence is interesting. It contains _five_ adjectives, something no editor would tolerate today (my first editor taught me that ‘the adjective is the enemy of the noun’, which is to say that if you’re using a lot of adjectives you probably aren’t using interesting enough nouns). Those were different times. Yet it is his diction that makes it so beautiful: the two most evocative words in it are ‘flinty’ (Colin is right) and ‘hack’.

Imagine being Darwin's editor -- how dare you!  [Did he really have one?]

Well, obviously The Times and Country Life _had_ editors. But I don't know how much they felt able to fiddle with Bernardo's copy.