‘If you don’t like this game, you’re in the wrong place’
Sleepy Carnoustie has a beach, a mill - and lots and lots of golf, writes Daniel Schofield
Set 40 miles north of Edinburgh on the mouth of the Barry Burn, Carnoustie’s identity is as entwined with golf as the threads of a tartan kilt. Asking residents what there is to do besides golf leads to plenty of pregnant pauses and furrowed foreheads. Even the local football club are nicknamed the Gowfers.
The first thing that strikes you stepping off the three-carriage trundler from Edinburgh is just how small and sleepy the town seems considering that 200,000plus people are about to descend upon it. Walking down the High Street yesterday, you could easily escape the fact that a major sporting championship is due to start in 24 hours’ time less than a Rory Mcilroy drive away.
Serving as a commuter town to Dundee, 11 miles to the east, Carnoustie, with a population of around 11,000 people, mainly revolves around a glorious beach and an adjacent mile-long high street refreshingly full of independent pubs, cafes and shops. With the white sand and turquoise water, you could – if you squinted hard enough and ignored the bracing wind coming off the North Sea – take yourself to be in the Mediterranean. During the early 20th century, the establishment of a railway station allowed it to become a day-tripping destination
A plaque dedicated to Billy Connolly in the Stag’s Head Inn takes pride of place
and the town was even known as the Brighton of the North. The advent of cheap package holidays to the true Mediterranean put pay to that moniker.
At the tourist information centre, which doubles as the town library, Aurora Mackintosh lists the main attractions as Barry Mill, a working 19th century meal mill, and the villages of Westhaven and Easthaven, which flank Carnoustie. A resident overhearing the question of why would you come to Carnoustie if you did not like golf, chirped: “I’d feel like saying you have come to the wrong place.”
It turns out that the main pull for out-of-town non-golf lovers are those, particularly Americans, attempting to trace their family ancestry. At the midpoint of the High Street is a beautifully maintained war memorial. The toll of losing more than hundred men during World War One for a town of Carnoustie’s size must have been devastating, particularly as so many family names are repeated. Two of the streets have since been named after Victoria Cross winners Lance Corporal Charles Jarvis and Petty Officer George Samson, who rescued several injured men at the Gallipoli landings before sustaining 19 bullet wounds from machine-gun fire. Historically, the town was built upon the local handloom loom weaving industry. Flax, in particular, was grown in vast quantities. It then came to rely upon agriculture and fishing with locally caught salmon being sent to Billingsgate Market in London by train. Carnoustie has been touched by celebrity. Roddy Woomble, lead singer of perennially underrated indie band Idlewild, attended Carnoustie High School while Ian Mcdiarmid, an Olivier and Tony award-winning actor and director most famous for his role as Star Wars villain Darth Sidious, was born here. Another Carnoustie boy made good was photographer Iain Macmillan, who took the picture of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.
Yet pride of place belongs to the plaque in the Stag’s Head Inn dedicated to Billy Connolly’s first public performance as a comedian on July 7, 1962. There is even a cardboard cutout of the Big Yin, which has apparently been a big hit with American tourists this week.