Bobbie Banks – reminiscing on the old golf course


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Bobbie Banks – reminiscing on the old golf course

 
Bobbie Banks left a set of audio recordings where he remembers his upbringing in and around Cruickness. Here he reads an extract from one of his own books, reminiscing on the old golf course when he was a boy.


 

The once-pristine green on which they rested, now only occasionally cropped by the teeth of a few sheep.

Thinking now of the swirling cylinders of the razor-sharp mowers that used to shave greens to such perfection. He could almost smell the aroma of the fresh-cut grass. Closing his eyes to summon up a mental picture of the greenkeepers as they swept the early morning dew from the surface of the greens
The slow rhythmic scything strokes of long tapered canes; the dew drops bursting, sparkling in the sunlight before settling into the earth below.

He knew none of it could ever be the same again, the quarry was spreading like a cancer into the beautiful old knowes, cutting relentlessly into the ancient rich green sward, through the bracken and the gorse-covered knowes, home to the partridge, the hare and the sweet-trilling skylark. All of whom, would soon disappear along with their environment, even the lovely contours of the land, and the peripheries untouched by actual excavations were being buried for all time under thousands of tons of unsightly rubble and earth as they removed it from the quarry surface as it advanced.

Already the first two houses adjacent to the quarry had gone, buried under the first bing, and he knew that inevitably, sometime in the future, the rest would follow, and their little community would just cease to exist.


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