Recap Scotland 2023
17-24 June

There are moments now and then when you receive a message that heralds a change in circumstances you hadn’t quite been prepared for. For good or bad, happy or sad, that moment comes to signal a before and after from which you won’t ever quite recover, from where a new chapter will forever be marked. At 18:28 on the 20th of June 2023, as we were making our way to the 3rd tee of The Castle Course, an email that would to the uninitiated seem like a banal piece of scheduling information landed in my inbox. It’s subject line: ‘Your Old Course Tee Time’. What had already been a great week was about to become one of the greatest weeks.

This photo essay, with images by Moritz, documents our time in Scotland as we traversed the links of Kilspindie, Dunbar, the New, Jubilee, Castle and Old courses of St Andrews, and Gullane No. 2. I have never fully understood what Jurgen Klopp means by ‘heavy metal football’, but waking up in Edinburgh the morning after our round on the Old Course the images and impressions burned into my mind, throbbing with a high that had required no pharmaceutical intervention, had me feeling like I had experienced something I could only describe as Heavy Metal Golf.