Golf in the Wild - Going Home - 1st Edition

In September 2014, Robin Down published his first book, Golf in the Wild, a travelogue which took the reader from his home club, Allendale, to the far north of Scotland.  The sequel, Golf in the Wild – Going Home has been recently published – a journey that picks up where the first book finished and takes the reader back to Allendale by a different route.

“It was a journey I felt compelled to take—there would have been a strong sense of a ‘job left undone’ if I had not told the story of the return journey, if I had not gone home.”

Like the first book, Golf in the Wild - Going Home is about much more than golf - it is part local history, part memoir and part travelogue; it tells the stories of local heroes and the more famous – such as John Lennon, Andrew Carnegie and Ramsey MacDonald.

It is the completion of a circular golfing pilgrimage. The route heads east along Scotland's remote northern shores, traversing the Flow Country, the Black Isle, the Moray Coast, the Scottish Heartlands and Borders before completing the circle at Allendale.

In its conclusion, it is also a work of the imagination. The story does not return to the Allendale course at High Studdon, which is well-documented in the first book.  Instead, an imaginary rail journey on the long-closed Border Counties Railway takes the reader from Riccarton to Hexham and then along the Hexham and Allendale Railway which closed to passengers in 1930.

The final destination is the old 9-hole course at Thornley Gate which closed in 1992. “I walked the course with an Allendale member who remembers it well – especially his hole-in-one at the eighth.  There is still evidence of greens and tees – a relatively short course, it would have been a real test of golf with narrow fairways, electrified fencing around the greens and extra-lush semi rough, regularly fertilized by the cattle which were free to roam.”

It is a story of return, loss, and golf in wild places.