Tee'd off

Golfers were entitled to feel a bit "putt out" when thieves stole flags worth more than £300 from two Scarborough courses.
A total of 12 flags were found to be missing by greenkeepers when they arrived at work at both South Cliff and North Cliff golf clubs.

Seven flags on the cliff-top holes, worth £245, were taken from South Cliff, while in two separate incidents five flags to the value of £175 were stolen from the North Cliff course.

South Cliff course manager David Roberts said he could not understand why anyone would want to take them. "They'd taken flags off all the greens. The head greenkeeper discovered them missing and when he reported it to the police they told him some had been taken from North Cliff as well."

North Cliff club secretary Jean Lloyd said the course had been vandalised on several occasions and flags went missing all the time.
"It's an ongoing thing that has just become routine."

Manager Colin Fairley added: "They took flags from the top of the course up near the railway line. It's a nuisance and it has cost the club a lot of money. It happened two nights in a row last week.

"Ninety per cent of the time they do it just for the hell of it, because sometimes we recover them – unless it's someone trying to get enough flags to build their own golf course! Whenever I catch anybody it tends to be teenagers. They come over and play a few holes themselves when they think it's quiet. We wouldn't mind that in itself so much, but they run their bikes through the fields sometimes and make divots on the greens."