Par 10, 000: A Golfing Odyssey Across Scotland's Mountains, Moors and Fields by David Ewen
At the start of the summer 2000, David Ewen found himself standing on the edge of the North Sea with a golf club drawn and nothing to aim at but Scotland. The plan: to hit a ball across the birthplace of the game, negotiating roads, towns, fields, rivers and mountains, camping where it came to rest. And the par for this quarter-million-yard course? Eight thousand. Here is someone quietly raging against the suffocating constraints of modern living, a grown man driving, pitching, putting and hacking his way across our increasingly cramped country, following his ball into the remotest corners of Scottish life. En route, David encounters a vast range of people with whom he discusses everything from land access to e.coli and fox-hunting. He finds numerous bizarre situations, including the experience of shearing sheep with a winner of "One Man and His Dog" and having his last golf ball blessed by a deacon before blasting it off into Loch Leven. The result is a snapshot of Scotland in the millennial year -part travelogue, part polemic, part personal memoir. An unashamedly mindless adventure, "Par 10,000" is a quirky tale of one man's rebellion against today's fast-living society and debunking of golf with all rules and regulations.