The Kilgrimol Room

Every club has a room where the volume drops. Ours is the Kilgrimol Room, and its name is older than the club, older than the school, and older than the town.

Kilgrimol was a settlement said to have been founded by Norse settlers more than a thousand years ago, out on the shore at Cross Slack - ground now occupied by the Old Links golf course. It had a chapel and a burial ground. The sea came for both. Nothing of it survives above ground, and everything about it is disputed except the name.

What survives is the story. On moonless nights, they say, you can still hear the bells of Kilgrimol tolling beneath the waves. It is the kind of tale that a coastal town tells about itself and half believes, and it was still current enough in 1876 for John Allen to name his new school for boys after it.

The school gave the name to the building, and the building gave it to us.

The Kilgrimol Room is the club's quiet room: a place to read, to play chess, to talk without shouting. The book exchange lives here, and above it hang framed photographs of members going back decades - the sort of pictures that start conversations between people who were not there. See the room in context on the tour of the club.

In one corner sits Les Dawson's chair, ornate to the point of comedy, which is presumably why he liked it. Members are welcome to try it.

The room's original glass-panelled doors spent many years gathering dust in an upstairs office before they were restored and reinstated in 2025. It is a small thing that made a large difference, and it is the reason the room now looks the way the building intended.

There is a pleasing symmetry to it. Kilgrimol was lost to the sea; the school that carried its name closed in 1927; and the club that inherited the building has kept both names alive without particularly meaning to. Two vanished institutions, still spoken aloud every week, by men asking where they left their reading glasses.