Highlands Links Review

Thompson called this his mountains and ocean course and it is the one he would want to be judged on. It opens beside the Atlantic at Ingonish, turns inland and climbs along the Clyburn River through a valley walled by the Cape Breton Highlands, then comes back out to the water. Nothing about the routing is convenient, and that is the point. The green sites were found rather than made, and the fairways roll over ground Thompson barely touched, because at the end of the 1930s there was neither the machinery nor the money to touch it with.

The seventh, Killiecrankie, climbs to a green sitting in a natural saddle. The sixteenth is called Sair Fecht, Scots for hard work, and the name is all the yardage book you need. The stretch up the river valley from the sixth is the best inland run of holes in Canada. Two things keep the experience below the architecture. Conditioning has been the weak point for decades: the season is short, Parks Canada budgets are what they are, and fairways can look patchy into autumn even after the bunker restoration that began in 2011 following storm damage, and even after Ian Andrew went back to Thompson's original lines.

And the walks from some greens to the next tee are long enough that the round takes five hours whether you like it or not. At 210 Canadian dollars for a peak season walking round it is no longer the steal it was ten years ago. It is still a course worth rebuilding a trip around.