Voor! Farmers Golf

By Ruth D’Alessandro, The Wildlife Gardener The Wildlife Gardener has an uneasy relationship with traditional golf. A contretemps with an arrogant golfer challenging my Public Right of Way, stray golf balls in my veg patch and drivers of silver (why are they always silver?) Mercedes forever pulling out of the local golf club in front of me without looking do not endear me to the type of people who play it. And the game itself looks mind-numbingly tedious.

So it was refreshing to see a variation of the G-game offered for family fun at Tulley’s Farm in West Sussex: Farmers Golf or in its original Dutch, Boerengolf. Boerengolf was invented by a Dutch cheese farmer as a protest at expensive fees and the Netherlands’ GVB test for Dutch would-be golfers – a written and practical exam in etiquette, game rules and competence that they are required to pass before they’re even allowed to set foot on the green stuff. With Farmers Golf, forget manicured fairways and raked bunkers. The only terrain it requires is a farmer’s field. The more hazards on the course in the shape of tractor tyres, barrels, ditches, barbed wire and livestock, the better.

Forget 9-irons and nasty little white balls. You hit a small leather football with a wooden clog-shaped club called a klomp. Forget 18 tiny holes of tedium. You play a round into 10 bucket-sized holes in the ground, avoiding the assorted agricultural obstacles as you go. It’s like Crazy Golf, but on a much larger scale. In fact it looked so much fun even I was persuaded to have a go. We created our own idiosyncratic but democratic method of scoring (so nobody got 0), and there was lots of cheating, ball-nudging, kicking, minor injuries and extra goes. Mr WG displayed power and klomp control worthy of a man of his stature. Poor Junior Wildlife Gardener no. 2 kept getting stuck in the rough:

And both JWGs found it great fun to climb into the large drainage pipe at Hole 5:

How did the golf-hating Wildlife Gardener herself get on? Well, the scores were as follows: JWG2: 20½, JWG1 25, Mr WG: 26½, Me 27!!! A winner by a half punt and a convert to Farmers Golf. And the 19th hole? No exclusive clubhouse, but some rather fine ices of the 99 variety, by purveyors Messrs Whippy.