Golf Course Design

The exciting brand of Fine Golf is a thinking person’s game:

It requires invention and creative shots, on courses that exemplify the ‘risk and reward’ strategic design concept.

Harry Colt and James Braid from around 1900 were the most prolific golf course architects and led golf course design to move the traditional penal hazards out of the direct line of play to the sides of the fairways.

They created a new strategic design style incorporating various ways of playing a hole with different risks and reward.

The concept of penal hazards has regained popularity within modern target courses, which employ deep rough, irrigated narrow fairways, and frequent lakes.  This reduces the strategic element and either accidentally or intentionally generates a new penal style of design.

Penal holes offer only two possible results, success or total failure.

Well designed fine golf courses are challenging but give everybody a chance.  Strategic and heroic features ensure the higher the risk, the higher the reward, while the high handicapper is still able to enjoy their round and be challenged at their level.

“Signature” holes are a modern phenomena:

The marketing gurus of television led commercial interests look for ‘signature’ holes.  Modern target courses get remembered for spectacular penal holes which attract easy television fame.

Nevertheless, it is not all downside, as the money that has come into the game via modern target golf has given us some advantages in helping develop new equipment for golf course design. For example ‘shaping’ is now much easier and less labour intensive.

The question naturally arises: can modern golf architects design true ‘Fine’ golf courses on land that is not naturally draining?

Kingsbarns is one attempt, heralded by a few as a great links course.  It was built on fertile meadow land sloping down to a rocky shore. This is the opposite of what is needed for a links course which needs infertile sandy soil that drains.  The bulldozers and shapers carved out a links design look with delightful revetted pot bunkering while artificial drainage and lots of sand allowed planting of fine grasses and a wonderful product evolved.  In my view it must be welcomed by anybody who enjoys Fine golf and it is an example of how modern technology in the hands of people with vision can give us a high “joy to be alive” Fine Golf factor.

Predictability wins: My only disappointment is the lack of quirkiness in the fairways. Perhaps it is difficult to artificially construct such natural features, which on fine courses often just happened to be there already.  I suspect nevertheless the influence of the Professionals, of whom many prefer flat fairways with their predictable bounce, may also be in the commercial mind of the architects!

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