To serious golfers, as well as to all those who watched Tiger Woods flounder at the British Open on television earlier in the summer, Scotland occupies a special place in the game. One of the most storied areas is a stretch of the East Lothian coast-line along the south shore of the Firth of Forth from Edinburgh to North Berwick. This stretch of sandy shores, dunes, inlets, and marshes contains some of the most famous of Scotland’s golf courses and some substantial chunks of the game’s history.

The small town of Gullane seems to exist solely to support the game and its players, with four courses (including the fabled Muirfield) inside its boundaries and a host of other historic courses within a 20-mile drive. Alberta writer Curtis Gillespie came to this golfing Mecca with his wife and two young daughters to spend a year exploring the area and documenting his impressions.

The result is an unusual combination of golf diary, travel guide, and family memoir that is a little too inclusive to completely succeed. Non-golfers will likely chafe at the golf content, while golfer readers may become impatient with the family anecdotes, absorbing as they are at times. The vignettes relating to the author’s dead father and his association with golf won’t be of much intreest to the general reader, and the insertion of related quotes from Gillespie’s background reading often seem more like literary name-dropping and erudition-flaunting than supportive background.

Gillespie does an excellent job of capturing the flavour of the area, its celebration of the game, and portraits of some of its colourful inhabitants. The downside is having to wade through extraneous material to get at the nuggets of interesting reading.