Birdies, Bikers, Bridies & Buicks
Carnoustie Country has never been short of a crust or two. You only have to leave the famous links behind and wander inland to discover birdies, bikers, bridies and Buicks—all firmly connected by the Angus countryside.
Birdies
Just outside the little market town stands Forfar Golf Club, one of Scotland’s oldest 18-hole inland courses. Designed by Old Tom Morris and later reshaped by James Braid, it plays more like a landlocked links than a conventional parkland.
The rolling fairways were partly formed when the ground was used for drying flax, creating long grassy swells that give the course its distinctive character. It is unusual, wonderfully natural and far less celebrated than it deserves.
Bikers
A few miles away, beside the ancient carved stones of Aberlemno, stands a modest cottage with an unlikely connection to American motoring folklore.
This was the ancestral home of the Davidson family, who left Angus for Wisconsin during the 19th century. In Milwaukee, descendants Arthur, Walter and William Davidson joined forces with a young engineer named William S. Harley.
Working from a backyard shed, they fitted a small engine to a bicycle. In 1903, the first Harley-Davidson roared into life. Before long, police officers, soldiers and leather-clad adventurers were riding Harleys across America and eventually around the world.
The Davidson Cottage remains in Angus, watched over by stones carved more than a thousand years ago. Outlander enthusiasts should approach those carefully. You never know where—or when—you might emerge.
Bridies
Forfar also shaped one of Scotland’s finest amateurs. Sandy Saddler represented Great Britain 14 times and Scotland on 22 occasions between 1959 and 1967. He won both his singles matches in the 1967 Walker Cup and captained the team ten years later. At home, he won the Forfar club championship seven times.
When I met Sandy, he regaled us with stories from his extraordinary golfing life—including being hired to teach the Sultan of Brunei. Yet even the temptations of an oil-rich kingdom could not keep him from Angus. Sandy Saddler returned to more than golf. His family name is also inseparable from one of Scotland’s great contributions to fast food: the Forfar bridie.
Long before the global burger chains arrived, the bridie—and Dundee’s sturdy meat pie, the peh—kept generations of east-coast Scots fuelled. Hot, filling and magnificently unconcerned with modern dietary advice, it remains compulsory eating in Forfar.
Who needs all the wealth of oil when you have a family empire built on bridies?
Buicks
Harley-Davidson was not Angus’s only contribution to American motoring.
David Dunbar Buick was born in Arbroath in 1854 and emigrated to Detroit as a child. An inventive engineer, he patented a lawn sprinkler and developed a process for enamelling cast-iron baths before becoming fascinated by the internal-combustion engine.
His revolutionary overhead-valve design produced more power than the prevailing flathead engines, and in 1903—the same year Harley-Davidson began—Buick Motor Company was born.
Buick himself never enjoyed the lasting fortune his name suggests, but his invention helped transform the American motor industry. Not bad for an Angus lad whose legacy would eventually include Tiger Woods, a television campaign and golfers being offered the keys to a new Buick if they could beat Tiger’s tee shot.
Only in Carnoustie Country could birdies, bikers, bridies and Buicks belong naturally in the same journey.
