A sign at Brancaster on the Norfolk coast on Sunday last. Note warning about “flying golf balls”. The beautiful links course behind the sign is that of the Royal West Norfolk club. It was laid out in 1892 and hasn’t changed much since — which is another way of saying that it was pretty good from the beginning. “Few things are more terrifying than the first hole at Brancaster on a cold, raw, windy morning,” wrote Bernard Darwin in The Golf Courses of the British Isles (1910), “when our wrists are stiff and our beautiful steely-shafted driver feels like a poker. There is a bunker – really a very big, deep bunker – right in front of our noses.”