Cawder Golf Club: A Round In My Grandfather’s Footsteps

It has been more than 30 years since I was last at Cawder Golf Club, but somehow it still feels like yesterday.

My Grandpa, the man who taught me to play golf and who loved this place so much, is the reason I have come back. He may have passed away more than 20 years ago but as I make my way along the grand driveway, it is almost as if I can feel his hand on my shoulder. For a few short hours, my Grandpa was going to be close again.

Bishopbriggs: A Boy Behind A Fence

I can still remember the first time he brought me to Cawder. We were driving through Bishopbriggs towards somewhere I didn’t know. Grandpa had grown up there, not far from his cousin Nat, and the place was threaded through so many of the stories he told me.

He loved talking about his childhood. He had grown up between the wars, without very much materially, but he remembered those years principally for the freedom they gave him. He and his pals had streets to explore, games to invent and adventures to find. Sport came naturally to him. Football in particular. He went on to play at a high level, including for Queen’s Park and for the Navy, and one of the stories that became part of our family folklore involved him saving a penalty from Bill Shankly. But golf belonged to a different world.

As a boy, Grandpa and his friends would gather beside the fence above the 10th green of Cawder’s Keir Course and watch the golfers on the other side. The “rich folk”, as he called them. They would stand outside and look in at this prestigious club and at the men fortunate enough to play there. Grandpa told me that even then he dreamed of one day doing well enough in life to become one of those “rich folk”. To walk through the gates himself. To become a member of Cawder Golf Club.

It is difficult to know how much a childhood ambition like that can shape a person. But knowing Grandpa, I suspect it mattered. Because Morton Buchanan was a striver. Not in a showy way. He wasn’t driven by titles or possessions. He simply wanted to create a better life for himself and, particularly, for the people he loved.

Making It Through the Gates at Cawder 

He married my Gran, Isa, and worked relentlessly to provide for their young family. He took whatever work he could find. At different points he was a tailor and a debt collector, the latter taking him into some of Glasgow’s most famous, and infamous, housing schemes. If there was work to be done and money to be earned, Grandpa would do it.

Slowly, his circumstances changed. The boy outside the fence moved up in the world. And eventually he had done well enough to walk through those gates. Morton Buchanan became a member of Cawder Golf Club. It meant something to him. Really meant something. By then he was mixing with people whom the little boy outside the fence could hardly have imagined knowing. One of his fellow members was Stevie Chalmers, the Lisbon Lion whose goal against Inter Milan won Celtic the European Cup in 1967. Chalmers would go on to become a three-time club champion at Cawder.

Grandpa loved telling me stories about those days. One concerned the better players at the club, Chalmers and my Grandpa among them, competing in the mornings for a Dunlop 65, one of the great golf balls of its era. Back then, every ball came individually wrapped in its distinctive paper wrapper. Except when one particular group played. Their Dunlop 65 wasn’t wrapped in paper. It was wrapped in a £10 note. This was serious money. But that was the nature of so many of Grandpa’s golf stories. They were populated by characters, laughter, competition, a little mischief and enough colour to make them unforgettable. He loved Cawder. Not simply the golf. The club. The people. The place. He spoke about it with a reverential hush.

The Course He Couldn’t Leave

As his two children, my mother, Isabel, and my uncle David, grew up and began their own families, Morton and Isa moved west to Stewarton in Ayrshire. Cawder was now roughly an hour away. Grandpa kept his membership. Every Saturday morning he would wake early and make the journey back across to Bishopbriggs to spend a few hours at the club he loved. Until one Saturday when everything changed. While he was away at Cawder, Isa suffered a heart attack. She survived. But Grandpa was devastated by the thought that when she had needed him he had been so far from home, playing golf. The guilt stayed with him. And so he left Cawder. However much he loved the club, there had never really been a contest. He loved Cawder. But Isa was always his first love. He joined somewhere closer to home instead. He continued to play as a member at an Ayrshire course that was not a patch on Cawder – it wasn’t the same. And my Gran knew it. Eventually, when she had recovered, she told him to go back. She could see what Cawder meant to him. So, with her blessing, he rejoined. I sometimes wonder whether he loved the club even more after that. Because now he knew what it felt like to lose it.

The Man Who Gave Me Golf

It was around that period that I began to develop an interest in golf. An interest became an obsession. And Grandpa was responsible for most of it. He taught me how to play. Patiently. Lovingly. I cannot remember him ever losing his temper with me on a golf course. I cannot remember frustration when I hit another bad shot, another topped iron or another ball somewhere it had no business going. He would simply help me try again. When he came home from work, I would beg him to take me out to play. Most of the time, somehow, he did. Those journeys became part of my childhood. The golf mattered, of course. But so did the car rides. Grandpa would tell me stories. About Glasgow. About football. About the Navy. About people he had known. And repeatedly about Cawder. There was always something different in his voice when he spoke about it. Almost a wistfulness. As though Cawder represented not simply a golf club but a particular chapter of his life; a place that somehow embodied where he had come from and what he had achieved.

One summer evening he took me to The Open at Royal Troon. As we walked through the car park, he spotted a badge on the ground. In one fluid movement (he remained absurdly fit even as he got older) he bent down, picked it up and pinned it to his lapel as though it had been issued to him personally that morning. It turned out to be a steward’s pass. And so the two of us proceeded to wander around Royal Troon with an entirely undeserved sense that we owned the place. Grandpa’s smile never left his face. That was him. Intelligent. Sociable. Gregarious. Bold. Opportunistic. And, when circumstances allowed, perfectly willing to push the boundaries a little.

“It’s Cawder”

Eventually came the journey I can still replay in my mind. We were driving through Bishopbriggs. Then across the bridge. Grandpa looked across at me. “Do you know where this is?” he asked. I didn’t. “It’s a very special place.” I thought for a moment. “Muirfield?” He smiled. “No. It’s Cawder.” Even writing those words now makes me smile. Because to Grandpa there may not have been much difference. Muirfield might have been one of the great names of golf. But Cawder was his great place.

And suddenly I was there. I remember the wide-eyed wonder of it. This was the place from all those stories. He introduced me to his friends. We played the Keir Course several times. And then, eventually, once Grandpa had decided my golf was sufficiently respectable, came what felt like the ultimate promotion: The Cawder Course itself. I was still very young. And in those days, or at least in my memory of them, the Cawder Course was not really a place for kids. I seem to remember being almost smuggled onto it very early one Saturday morning. I suspect Grandpa had carefully calculated the point at which nobody likely to object would be around. We stood on the 1st tee. One of his friends was there. Somehow, against all reasonable expectation, I hit a solid drive, a good iron, a crisp wedge and holed the putt from six feet for a par. I remember glancing up at my Grandpa and he was bursting with pride in front of his playing partner. We didn’t play all 18 holes that morning. We cut across various parts of the course before eventually finishing on the 14th green. I remember being told that I certainly wasn’t going to be playing the downhill par-three 18th, with its green sitting there beneath the gaze of the clubhouse. There were limits. Even for Grandpa.

Afterwards we went inside. Upstairs. There was a bar I wasn’t allowed into and another room where I was. I sat there watching Formula One on the television. It is extraordinary what stays with you. Not the score. Not which clubs I hit. Not what I shot. A television. A room. The smell of a clubhouse. Grandpa disappearing through a door I couldn’t follow him through. Fragments. But precious ones.

A Return Thirty Years Later

More than three decades later, I drove into Cawder Golf Club again. This time, I was the grown-up, even if I still felt a bit like a child. My son was sitting next to me. And I was telling the stories. About the boy at the fence. About the rich folk. About Isa. About Stevie Chalmers. About the Dunlop 65 wrapped in a £10 note. About the steward’s badge at Troon. About the morning Grandpa brought me here. “Do you know where this is?” For all those years, I had carried Cawder around in my memory. Now suddenly it was real again. The drive into the club felt like stepping backwards through time. And there he was everywhere. Not as some ghostly presence. Something simpler than that. Memory.

The opening stretch at Cawder remains magical. The 1st and 2nd holes run alongside the driveway and retain the magic and mystique I remembered from childhood. They feel like an introduction not simply to a golf course, but to somewhere slightly removed from the world outside. Then, on the 3rd, the course begins to climb. The walk takes you upwards into the landscape, the ground opening out and views reaching towards the Campsie Hills beyond. It’s a genuinely beautiful transition.

Very little has changed at Cawder. Thank goodness. The place he loved is still there. The exceptional putting surfaces are as quick and smooth as ever, the lush turf still resembles a freshly hoovered green carpet in places. Cawder may have renamed the stretch between the 13th tee and the 16th green its very own “Amen Corner”, but the holes are still the same. And still wonderful. 

Walking in His Footsteps

And as my son and I climbed into the hills, I found myself thinking less about golf shots and more about Grandpa. The way he whistled. His smile. His sense of humour. His laugh. The way he smoked only when he thought he was safely beyond my Gran’s field of vision. I hated the smell of cigarettes from anyone else. With Grandpa, strangely, I loved it. Because it smelled of him. Benson & Hedges mixed with Extra Strong Mints to hide the evidence. Even now, more than 20 years after he died, I can summon that combination instantly.

Memory is strange like that. You can struggle to remember the precise sound of someone’s voice, however desperately you want to hear it again. And then a smell transports you back in half a second. Walking around Cawder, memories kept surfacing without being invited. I remembered the way his head moved just before he swung a golf club. I remembered the pleasure he took in people. I remembered how good he was at making other people feel that he was genuinely delighted to see them. And I remembered being a little boy who simply wanted to be wherever his Grandpa was.

The Magpie at Cawder Golf Club

And then there was the magpie. On one green, a lone magpie appeared close by. Nothing particularly unusual in that. Then it happened again. And again. Over the course of the round, a lone magpie appeared by the side of no fewer than nine of the greens we played. Perhaps it was the same bird. Perhaps there were several. Perhaps Cawder simply has an unusually sociable population of magpies. But it kept coming close. Close enough that we started noticing. Then expecting it. And eventually talking about it. I am not particularly given to signs from beyond. I know what coincidence is, and I know how easily grief can make us search for meaning where none exists. Maybe this was simply a grandson who, even after all these years, still misses his Grandpa enormously and wanted something to be true. Maybe it was nothing. Maybe it was something more.

But if Morton Buchanan were ever going to return as an animal, a magpie feels about right. Highly intelligent. Extremely sociable. Gregarious. Bold. Opportunistic. And occasionally inclined to push the boundaries of acceptable behaviour. See: Royal Troon steward’s badge. I smiled every time it appeared. And for those few hours, I allowed myself to wonder.

Three Generations at Cawder 

There is something golf does better than almost any other sport. It allows generations to meet. Not simply to watch one another compete, but actually to occupy the same space. To walk the same ground. To hit shots from the same places. To talk between them. Grandpa taught me the game. He walked golf courses beside me when I was a boy. Now here I was at Cawder, more than 30 years later, walking beside my own son, who he never got the chance to meet.

I don’t know whether my son will remember every hole we played. I hope not, in a way. Because that isn’t really what lasts. I don’t remember my score from those childhood rounds with Grandpa. I don’t know what he shot. I couldn’t tell you exactly which route we took across the Cawder Course that first morning I played it. But I remember the important things. I remember how safe I felt with him. I remember how much he made me laugh. I remember how patient he was. I remember him being proud of me. And I remember knowing, even as a child, that Cawder Golf Club mattered enormously to him.

What I understand now, returning as an adult, is why. For Morton Buchanan, Cawder represented far more than golf. It was the distance between the little boy standing behind the fence and the man he eventually became. It was aspiration made real. It was friendship. It was belonging. It was Saturday mornings and early starts. It was the reward for all those jobs, all those hours worked and all those sacrifices made for his family. And eventually it became something he could share with his grandson. Now, in some small way, I had shared it with his great-grandson too.

The Long Road Back to Cawder

As we came towards the end of our round, I found myself not wanting to leave. Perhaps that shouldn’t have surprised me. Grandpa never really wanted to leave Cawder either. Life took him away once. Love took him away another time. But he found his way back. He left for love, and returned. I left for thirty years, and returned. The same shape, a generation apart. And it took me more than 30 years. I wish I could have driven through those gates with him sitting beside me again. I wish he could have met the 14-year-old walking next to me. I wish I could have watched the two of them talk golf. I wish I could have heard him whistle one more time. But grief does not give us those things. It gives us memories. And occasionally, if we are lucky, it gives us places where those memories suddenly become vivid again.

For me, Cawder is one of those places. For a few hours, I wasn’t simply remembering my Grandpa. I was walking in his footsteps. I could hear the stories again. I could see the smile. I could almost smell the Benson & Hedges and Extra Strong Mints. And every now and again, a lone magpie would land nearby and look at me. Maybe it meant nothing. Maybe it meant everything. Either way, I smiled. God, I miss him.

*For more information or to book a tee time, visit CawderGolfClub.com

Cawder Golf Club: key facts

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Cawder Golf Club: frequently asked questions

Where is Cawder Golf Club?

Cawder Golf Club is in Bishopbriggs, just north of Glasgow. The entrance is on Cadder Road, with the clubhouse reached along a driveway through the course. The postcode is G64 3QD. Visitor information

How many courses does Cawder have?

Cawder has two 18-hole courses. The par-70 Cawder Course is the championship layout featured in this article. The par-68 Keir Course offers a flatter walk and more forgiving golf, with views across the Kelvin valley. Course details

Who designed the Cawder Course?

The Cawder Course was designed by James Braid, the five-time Open champion and one of golf’s most influential course architects. About the course

Can visitors play at Cawder Golf Club?

Yes. Visitors are welcome and can book through the club’s website or call the pro shop on 0141 772 7102. When booking online, select either the Cawder Course or the Keir Course. Book a round

How much does it cost to play at Cawder?

Published June–September green fees are £65 midweek and £75 at weekends for the Cawder Course, and £45 midweek and £55 at weekends for the Keir Course. Lower seasonal rates are also available. Check the booking page for your chosen date. Current green fees

Does Cawder have its own Amen Corner?

Yes. The Cawder Course has its own stretch known as Amen Corner, adding another distinctive feature to a course celebrated for its putting surfaces and views towards the Campsie Hills. Explore the Cawder Course

Are there practice facilities at Cawder?

Yes. Visitors playing that day can use the practice nets, two practice fairways, chipping greens and two putting greens. Bring your own golf balls for the practice areas. Practice facilities