Meet the Man Who Has Played all 225 Links Courses in Great Britain
The shockwaves of the pandemic set golf obsessive Sam Cooper and his wife Harriet off on the adventure of a lifetime around the British coastline.
“From this evening, I must give the British people a very simple instruction: you must stay at home”
In March 2020, these fateful words from the Prime Minister signalled the beginning of lockdown. Harriet and I exchanged uneasy glances as Boris Johnson announced that the world was changing. At that time, Covid was still an unknown quantity. We didn’t know if it would affect us or our parents, whether we could continue working, and how the housing market, the industry we worked in, would survive.
The next few weeks were surreal. Trips out were limited to bike rides, dog walks, or visits to the local supermarket, whether for our own shopping or to pick up groceries ordered online for my parents.
Harriet and I worked together in the real-estate industry. It had been a stressful few months with one thing and another: we knew we needed a change.
Planning the Adventure
It seemed like no time at all before we exhausted Netflix of anything worth watching. What else could we have done? As the weeks of lockdown turned into months, we spent more time watching videos on YouTube. Specifically, travel vlogs. Harriet and I spent a couple of weeks in August 2019 on a driving holiday around the North Coast 500, a magical circular journey of, you guessed it, 500 miles around the north coast of Scotland. I couldn’t resist a couple of nights in St Andrews at the start, and we added some time on the Isle of Skye at the end.
At the other extreme, the route took us to the John O’Groats signpost – marking the north-west tip of mainland Britain. This was the spark that ignited our curiosity. It didn’t start as a golf trip; it began as a wanderlust, a desire to escape the stresses of our work and the rigidity of lockdown.
We were excited now.
We had something to look forward to, a light at the end of the lockdown tunnel. So, our questions turned to practical ones. How were we going to fund this sabbatical? We had some savings, but not enough to justify both not working for months on end. Half the country would be looking for a mini-break once restrictions lifted. With foreign travel still off the cards, we’d be competing with hordes of like-minded ‘staycationers’ for a hotel room. Fortunately, YouTube gently suggested a solution. ‘You might be interested in...’
Van Life: Life on the Road
If you search ‘VanLife’ on YouTube nowadays, you’ll be inundated with thousands of slick videos, many with clickbait titles. The channel suggested by YouTube’s algorithm belonged to Chris and Sara, a husband and wife who had converted a Mercedes Sprinter van in 2019 and documented the entire process. We watched the short videos with regular interjections of ‘we could do that…’ Our plans started big. Inspired by Chris and Sara’s Sprinter van conversion, we began looking at ‘Schoolies’, the trend of buying an old American-style school bus and converting it into a proper mobile home on wheels.
We needed a 3.5-tonne van. I could drive one of those without needing any upgrade to a standard driving licence. But it had to be a ‘long wheel base’, and it had to be the ‘high roof’ version, tall enough for my six feet, two inch frame to be able to stand up in without stooping. We’d decided we wanted a fixed bed in the van, none of the dismantling and rebuilding nonsense. A shower and toilet, the best Wi-Fi we could get, a good water tank, and somewhere we could cook a proper meal. Plus, a table and comfortable chairs to work from. This was our wish list, and we began scouring the internet for something affordable.
We knew we had to act fast, and when we saw one come up for sale on a Friday evening, we decided to drive down to Bristol to view it the following morning. It didn’t look like much. A slightly battered VW Crafter with 150,000 miles on the clock. He’d done some of the hard work. The electrics and plumbing were there, and there was a large area for the bed in the back. Harriet and I didn’t take long to deliberate. We paid him a deposit and agreed to come back and collect it if he could sort out a couple of easy fixes the following week. It was happening.
The Conversion
We gave my golfers back the best chance possible of surviving by finding a company that would cut out window panels. This made room for an extra few inches for a modified king-size mattress and we then added some insulation of the ‘bedroom’ making it comfortable enough to act as a retreat from the elements we’d undoubtedly face.
We enlisted some help to give the kitchen a new lease of life. Harriet fired up her sewing machine to make new covers for the ‘sofa’ and within a few weeks, we had our mobile dormitory, ready for adventure. Our cocker spaniels, Winnie and Watson, were coming with us, and while it was going to be a squeeze, at least we’d be comfortable.
Setting Off
The issue was that there was no real list of the links courses of Great Britain. I’d largely based mine on a book published a decade earlier called ‘True Links’, which claimed to be the definitive list of 247 links courses globally. I already knew there were omissions, so I turned to the internet to build my own list. By the time the tour was well and truly underway, the total had risen to 225. Through my series of Journals, I get to share the stories from our adventure of a lifetime. It is one that quite literally changed the course of our lives. There were difficult times, of course, but they were outweighed by the highs. The extraordinary places we visited, the people we met.
The questions I get asked most often are about the tour, about why we lived in an old, rusty van for months on end, and what drove us to change our lives so dramatically.
Subscribe to Links from the Road
This is an excerpt from Volume 1 of Sam Cooper’s Links from the Road journals.
This 18-volume series covers every links course in Great Britain. Volume 1: The Wirral, Liverpool and Southport is available to purchase now from www.linksfromtheroad.com for £17 with subscription offers also available.