The 1856 clubhouse of Dunbar Golf Club is quite quaint with a bar/restaurant and locker rooms downstairs. An ancient spiral staircase leads to the upstairs offices where we met Cameron Byrne. He thought it a coincidence that his screen’s wallpaper changed to an Arizona scene when we walked in.
We shared that we absolutely had to play at the Dunbar Golf Club during this trip to Scotland because a great grandfather to the seventh “great” was in a battle there in 1650. It was a massacre which the Scots lost even though Cromwell’s British army was very ill. If only the Scots had stayed on the hill rather than descend to the burn as commanded, our surviving ancestor, Daniel Cone may not have been marched to England and shipped off to New England as an indentured servant.
Cameron’s associate Verena sheepishly disclosed that she is English and it’s tough to admit the outcome of the battle there at Dunbar. We laughed and said we didn’t hold it against her. We told her that one Scottish friend jokingly said, “They did you a favor.”
We were going to have a cup of coffee downstairs but decided to proceed to the pro shop next to the first tee and check in early. As we repeated the story in the shop, we had an excited tap on the shoulder for a different coincidence. It was the President of Scottish Prisoners of War Society. Who knew there was such an organization? He showed us their website and looked up Daniel Cone on their records, confirming the family story. The crazy thing is that he was from Texas and did not even golf, but because his name is David Dunbar and he is chieftain of the clan Dunbar, he had come to the shop for swag with his name. If we had the coffee, we would have missed him. Timing really is everything and we were where we were supposed to be.
We went outside together to look at the very hill of the battle and throughout the round there was a deep-rooted sense of belonging to this place, especially when we crossed the burns that run through the course. Those burns are furnished with heavy duty ball retrievers on the side and sizeable fish within. More
