When locals say "the Glen", it can mean a few different things. If you're a member, then the golf. Perhaps you walk your dog through the wooded path down by the burn. The mill ruins scrambled over by kids. The clubhouse where community clubs meet. All of that, locals mean when they say "the Glen".
I don't play golf. I walk past the Glen clubhouse most days, and drop in for a drink or something to eat every so often. So when members vote soon on what happens to it, that's not simply a question about golf to me.
Older than the fairways
The Glen was here long before the golf club. Just along from the clubhouse, where the burn runs, sit the ruins of three small watermills, the Mills of Kintreath. These belonged to North Berwick Priory in the Middle Ages and ground grain from the Priory's own farm nearby (Abbey Farm, whose 17th-century dovecote still stands). Victorians called the shaded path past the ruins the Ladies' Walk.
The golf course itself came later, and it was built for the town. North Berwick's Town Council put it there, opening in 1908, for people priced out of the private links next door. One of the first municipally owned courses in the world, by most accounts. The club didn't take the name Glen for itself until 1930. It borrowed it from a piece of ground people had already been walking, and avoiding golf on, generations before anyone here had heard of a green fee. Every one of us living in this town has some interest in what happens to it now, whether we've swung a club in our lives or not.
Something like forty community groups use the clubhouse: the Air Cadets, the RNLI, Leuchie, the Abbey Church. Last year I was at a 50th birthday party there myself. The room was full of people from the town, fancy dress, plenty of noise, that view sitting behind everyone's shoulders the whole night. That's not a golf memory. It's a North Berwick one, same as the mill and the mossy dell and the town council building a course nobody would be priced out of.
The deal on the table
Members vote soon on handing day-to-day running to The Ancient Links Golf Company for 125 years, in exchange for £8–10m of investment and a push to grow visitor rounds from around 7,000 to 10,000 a year. TALGC already runs two other Scottish clubs, and its controlling shareholder is Woodfield Partners LLC, a firm registered in Jupiter, Florida, with the right to appoint or remove its directors.
None of that is unreasonable on its own. A club with a clubhouse rebuild and new irrigation to pay for, and a genuine offer of outside capital, isn't obviously making a bad choice. It's not clear that the members of the club have a clear position. This isn't outside money versus a united club. It's a club working out what it actually wants, same as the rest of us tend to.
The shape of the proposition
What I keep coming back to is the shape of the proposition. A hundred and twenty-five years is longer than anyone voting can be held to account for, and long enough that whoever signs it can't really promise what happens after they're gone.
Nobody has to break a promise for a golf club optimising for visitor numbers to slowly stop feeling like somewhere local community groups can use to meet. Nobody tells the community no. The change is smaller than that. A Tuesday evening slot just starts looking different to whoever's doing the sums.
This isn't a story about losing the ability to walk in the glen or use the coastal path. The deal is about the course and the clubhouse. What's really at stake is quieter than a vote. Whether the clubhouse stays somewhere this town can use and feels welcome using. Whether it keeps doing what the mill and the walk and the 1908 course all did before it: belonging to whoever's here, not just whoever's playing golf that day.