There has never been a buggy on the Greensward links, and there never will be. This is not stubbornness, though we are happy for it to be mistaken for such. It is that golf, properly understood, is a walk with an object, and to remove the walk is to be left with only the object, which was never the interesting part.
A round on foot is four miles of coast taken slowly. You feel the ground change under you — the give of the fairway, the firmer sand beneath the bunker's lip, the rise of the twelfth that never looks like much until you're climbing it. A player carried over all of that in a cart has, we think, not really been to the course at all.
The walk is not the price of the golf. The walk is the golf, with a few shots along the way.
Time to think
Between shots there is nothing to do but walk and think, and this is where the game does its quiet work. The bad hole is put behind you somewhere around the next tee. The good one is savoured the length of a fairway. A companion, walking beside you, becomes a friend in a way that a companion seated beside you in a cart somehow never quite does.
We keep a small fleet of hand trolleys for those who need them, and a caddie or two for those who'd rather. But the walk itself is not optional here, and our members would not have it any other way.
— The Secretary