A Season in Dornoch

In 1977, Lorne Rubenstein, an avid golfer, first travelled to Dornoch in the Scottish Highlands. Young and adrift in life, he sought to uncover an authentic sense of self and turned instinctively to a place where his beloved game was purest. The experience had a profound effect on Rubenstein. Twenty-three years later, in 2000, now an established golf writer, Rubenstein returned to Dornoch to spend an entire summer. He rented a flat with his wife close to the Royal Dornoch Golf Course and set out to explore the area on many levels. Rubenstein writes about the melancholy history of the Highland Clearances, which left stunningly beautiful landscape sparsely populated to this day. He writes about the friendly and sometimes eccentric people who love their town, their golf and their single malt whiskey and delight in sharing them with visitors whom they recognize as kindred spirits, but most of all he writes about a summer lived around golf, in a community where golf is king and the golf course is part of the common lands where townspeople stroll of an evening. Playing here, Rubenstein gradually begins to relax, to return to golf as play, as opposed to a game of analysis and effort. A Season in Dornoch: Golf and Life in the Scottish Highlands (Mainstream sport).