Aberdovey Golf Club

Golf came to Aberdovey in 1892, when Arthur Ruck carried a set of clubs down to a strip of rough ground between the railway and the sea on Aberdovey Common and planted flowerpots at intervals to make a rudimentary nine holes. Ruck was the uncle of Bernard Darwin — grandson of Charles Darwin, and the finest golf writer the game has produced — who learned his golf here, served as the club's first Captain in 1897 and its President in 1944, and famously called Aberdovey "the course that my soul loves best of all the courses in the world." The club is also the birthplace of the Welsh Golfing Union, formed here in 1895.

The links runs out and back along a narrow shelf of duneland between the foothills of southern Snowdonia and the Dyfi estuary on Cardigan Bay. Darwin himself recruited Harry Colt and then James Braid to revise the course, and Herbert Fowler also had a hand in it — though the club, conservative to the last, adopted Colt's and Fowler's ideas only piecemeal and removed Braid's changes entirely after a revolt by the members. What remains is pure, honest, traditional links golf rather than anything tricked-up.

Its most famous hole is the blind par-3 3rd, "Cader" — played over a high dune ridge to a hidden green. The name means "chair" in Welsh and echoes Cader Idris, the mountain that broods over the town; the enormous bunker that once fronted the green and terrified Darwin's generation has since been grassed over. Throughout, the Cambrian Coast railway runs the length of the course and the estuary and bay frame the round.

Aberdyfi itself — a harbour village of painted houses looking out over the estuary — is one of the loveliest golfing bases in Wales, and the links is among the great golf-by-train destinations anywhere: the station sits right beside the first tee.