From the hearth: Two fresh perspectives of Scotland. First, Darren Kilfara on the pleasures of playing the Old Course with a plastic mat, the strategic sense of its bunkers, and drinks inside the R&A; then, Lorne Rubenstein on Dornoch and the Highlands.

The Hearthstone Review: I imagine your year in St. Andrews spoiled you. You must have experienced serious decompression returning.

Darren Kilfara: It's apples and oranges completely. Scottish golf is a law unto itself, really. The whole golfing culture is entirely different as well. So, I think that's a pretty fair assessment.

THR: You detail a conversion of sorts that all American golfers, great and small, have to wrestle with when they go to Great Britain or Ireland. Links golf, at first impression, seems to rub us the wrong way. Is there something downright un-American about seaside golf?

Darren Kilfara: That might be a little bit over the top. Certainly in Texas there's plenty of wind around so you have certain aspects of your game and in your armory to combat links golf, but it's the ground game really that takes getting used to. The first time I stood out there from 40 yards looking at a fairly bumpy landscape and knowing that I needed to hit a putter to get it as close to the hole as possible. Decisions like that make you think. It's really quite foreign to everything the American golfer has to face on a regular basis.

THR: An American visitor can't help notice how deeply golf is intertwined in the community there. You write: "Scottish golf has always been for the masses," and that "Golf works in Scotland because everything's taken in moderation, including moderation."

Darren Kilfara: Most certainly. You find that golf penetrates the society right down to the lower classes. I mention in the book that its origins go back to archers, the lowest class of medieval society. They were the ones King James had to prevent from playing golf. That sort of continues to the present day where you can go out, even on the St. Andrews great courses, not so much the Old Course but the New Course and the Jubilee Course. You'll find the locals out there in their impenetrable accents in jeans. It's what they're used to wearing and it's sort of how golf works in Scotland. It's really refreshing. There seems to be less baggage culturally when you get on the golf course. People find it much easier to be themselves in Scotland, I find.

THR: The R & A opens its doors to the great unwashed one day each year.

Darren Kilfara: That's right. November 30th is St. Andrews Day, a national Scottish holiday of sorts. Anyone including women - that's the only day in fact women can go into the clubhouse. I actually had the chance to play a match where we were invited into the R&A for drinks afterwards. It certainly gives you shivers. It's a special place.

THR: You had sandwiches and drinks after the round. I can think of Eisenhower's copy of the portrait of Bob Jones that hangs there. What else do you recall that you really enjoyed?

Darren Kilfara: The big room on the ground floor. You see the lockers that stretch up to the ceiling it seems, with all these famous names over them of the honorary members and some present-day members whose names you'd recall. But then also to go upstairs and look down upon the first tee and the 18th green from the balcony of the clubhouse, that's just - to think - sometimes you'll see when the Open's played at St. Andrews, you'll see all the members looking down with this privileged view. I mean, golf in Scotland is a classless game but there's still something that really gets to you about being in this privileged place, to look down upon the "Home of Golf" like that.

THR: The management of the Old Course has changed in recent years, not without some controversy. And every time the Open returns to St. Andrews, golfers for the whole year previous have to carry around little mats to play off of. How awful that must be for that once in a lifetime visitor. It must be like going to one of the world's great restaurants and getting a grilled cheese. That can't be much fun.

Darren Kilfara: It's not. It's also during the winter. Funnily enough, even though the Old Course is rightly revered as a place that all the public can play; it's not a private course - me being in St. Andrews paying $150 for a year of golf [as a student], a deal which still boggles my mind when I stop and think about it - but, um, when you have tournaments at the Old Course like the Open Championship, there's so much golf that is played on the Old Course, they have to do something to get the turf back into condition. The pros in the last several opens, '95 and 2000, have commented on how much better condition the turf was for those two relative to previous years just because they were able to push the public aside for awhile. I have mixed feelings.

It's great that the Old Course can still test the greatest golfers in the world but at the same time it stands for more than that. I kinda wish the public didn't have to be shunted aside for almost a year.

THR: Well, you think of those four guys from Phoenix who are doing their once in a lifetime trip.

Darren Kilfara: Exactly. They will knock some quid off the price tag so you're not paying the full fee but yea, having that inch of phony Astroturf in front of you. You try and take your club back and the mat jostles and the ball falls off. I mention in the book that some of my university colleagues would go out on the course with their mats. They'd lay their balls down right next to the mat and the marshals from a distance might think they were playing off the mats but they'd take their divots as normal. I'm certain Joe Sixpack would be similarly so inclined on his one vacation to Scotland. The Old Course, to be honest, Jim, is not a course you can play just once and even begin to understand. Many Americans will go to the Old Course and go, what's the big deal? It's relatively flat.

The greens are very strange to the untutored eye. Being able to be in St. Andrews for a year and play it, you really have to play the Old Course six or seven times to begin to have a clue at what you're looking at.

THR: Sam Snead has never been one to be particularly sensitive about anything. He called it: "The kind of real estate you couldn't give away."

Darren Kilfara: It's really impenetrable. Even the famous holes, the 17th and 18th holes, which all golfers will probably have seen on television at some point, you look at the 18th fairway and you see all these bumps and hollows, you wonder what is all this about. The fairway's 100-yards wide. What is the big deal about this place? Even such a broad avenue-d hole as the 18th, I'm really fond of it. It actually introduces strategy for all golfers because, to be honest, very few golfers have trouble hitting a 100-yard wide fairway but even then, how close to the wall on the right side do you come to give yourself the best angle into the green. Or, do I play way out to the left and lengthen the hole and give myself another angle depending upon where the pin placement is.

So it's a golf course which once you get to know it becomes accessible for everyone but until you get a chance to study it - and certainly visitors who are only going to play it just once - should do their best to try and study the course beforehand to get a sense of what they're going to see.

Just that if you don't know what you're in for, you will get out there and be faced with a 150-yard shot over relatively flat ground and say, "What's to this?" You almost have to see it a couple of times before you begin to understand where all the bunkers are, for example. So many are hidden on the line of play, in the middle of the fairway in some cases. In other cases, just off to the side. All of the bunkers make perfect strategic sense but it's very difficult to explain that to an American who's stuck in the bottom of one of them during his first round.