Moving Heaven And Earth - Should Golf Course Architects Move As Much Or As Little Earth As Possible?

Moving Heaven And Earth

Pondering an interesting angle from which to view golf course architecture, I realised that for most of my many years of playing I have had a firmly-held belief that courses designed by nature are superior to those that have required excessive use of diggers. In general, as in most things apart from wine, I prefer subtlety to over-the-top enthusiasm, and so I have always had a soft spot for the likes of a Cleeve Hill or a Church Stretton, perhaps England's most natural course, over say, just as an example and it’s still very enjoyable, The Brabazon Course at The Belfry.

Alongside this, built into Golf Monthly’s evaluation criteria for the course rankings, under Visual Appeal, we have always asked the question, “Is the course in keeping with its surroundings?” This is still very important, both from a rankings perspective and to me personally, but I think it’s worth challenging myself and asking whether one design approach is inherently better than the other? Should the architect keep things as natural and simple as possible, or should everything possible be done to make the best course conceivable?

Natural Versus Manmade

So what are the reasons why some courses have graduated to greatness with minimum input while others have required every type of intervention under the sun? Perhaps the most obvious one is that if the club and its architect have been blessed with a brilliant topography, little has needed to change. Just look at the Old Course at St Andrews which was designed by nature and where the human input is its 112 bunkers and the greens.

Golf has been played over this rumpled tract of land for 600 years, and while there will be changes for the 2027 Open Championship including some substantial bunker work, this is largely being done to reinstate the original playing lines and challenge for the very best golfers. It will remain, despite everything, as natural as an Open venue can be.

It's also worth remembering that many of our oldest and best courses were created before we had the machinery to make today’s seismic landscape changes. Take Royal North Devon at Westward Ho! which is about as natural as they come despite recent changes to combat the incursions of the Atlantic Ocean. Dating back to 1864, this is the oldest course in England and there is little visible apart from the presentation of tees and greens to tell you that more than 160 years have passed. Its timelessness is arguably its greatest asset. The last time I played here, someone in my four almost lost a drive he had hit right down the middle. We eventually found it a nano-second inside the cut-off time (probably not!), in a fresh rabbit scrape. While this is not ideal, it’s this elemental approach along with the sea grasses that defines golf here.

I am even more taken with the lofty delights of the likes of Llandrindod Wells. It wouldn’t have been the most obvious site on which to build a course back in 1890, but James Braid’s later changes transformed this into a timeless and seemingly natural adventure that is a riot of fun.

Another barrier to more extravagant development is cost. From a financial perspective, then clearly the more earth shifting, ground preparation, lake building and feature importation, the more it all costs. There are also planning rules and regulations nowadays that rightly question the pros and cons of major groundworks. These would not have been such a consideration during the Golden Age of golf course architecture, effectively from 1890 until its real peak in the 1920s, but they certainly are now.

Very few significant inland courses have been opened in the UK&I in recent years, though one that springs to mind is The Inspiration just inside the M25 in west London. This has been built as a modern, inland links, and although perhaps not fully in keeping with its setting, it’s very enjoyable and really does work.

The Best Of Both Worlds

Perhaps what brought the natural versus manmade debate into sharp focus in my mind was a visit last October to the Lake District to play a few courses for the first time. My final port of call was Silverdale which, like Pyle & Kenfig and Porthmadog, two of the best golf courses in Wales, is very much a game of two halves. Silverdale was a 9-holer until 1992 when it expanded to 12, before becoming a full 18 in 2002. The result is a brilliantly chalk and cheese hybrid with nine very distinctive and pleasingly unusual old holes as well as nine perfectly decent and attractive, but how shall I put it, more ‘sensible’ holes. Which do I prefer? Well each has its merits with the original holes packed with quirk and charm while the newer nine are still memorable but arguably fairer.

As I drove home afterwards, I was minded of Headfort in Ireland where the Championship Course and Old Course sit side by side but could hardly be more different. The former was designed by Christy O’Connor Junior and has a modern, almost Augusta-like look and feel while the Old is more regimented as it runs back and forth through mature woodland. At Silverdale I prefer the older holes while at Headfort it’s definitely the other way round.

New And Grand Designs

A glance at the latest Golf Monthly Top 100 in the UK&I will reveal that fifteen have only opened in the last 35 years. Of these, few if any have not taken full advantage of substantial land movement including Dumbarnie Links and Kingsbarns where the entire playing area landscape has been transformed away from the farmland on which they now reside. Two more young Scottish giants have recently seen a second course open alongside them. Trump Aberdeen has opened its New Course, while Old Petty at Cabot Highlands is a brilliant addition to the original Castle Stuart which itself only opened in 2009. The latter development is particularly personal to me as my mother lived close by and on my frequent visits I used to walk her dogs over the very same land.

I remember hearing plans for the development and thinking “that will never work”… how wrong can anyone be?! A perfect example of where my bias towards the old, and more natural, was misguided. Happily, it’s also possible to make big changes but in a way that suits the setting perfectly such as the Nick Faldo design at Chart Hills in Kent. Sometimes the movement of land can be quite extreme as on the Nicklaus Course at St Mellion and at the Manor House in Wiltshire, but even here, the end result is two thrilling and very photogenic courses.

Grand Designs Revisited

Dig deeper into the Top 100 and even among our most established and favourite courses, change is constant. By my reckoning, four of the top seven have opened one or more new holes in the last six years. At least eight more have done the same, most recently Aldeburgh, and while I believe that such changes are almost always sympathetically done, they require real expertise from the architect. Not everything will work immediately - there were plenty of raised eyebrows about the new short hole at Royal Liverpool during The Open in 2023 - but these are works that require great creativity and sensitivity, and often need tweaks to make them perfect. Even aside from brand new holes, I would imagine that at least half the courses in the Top 100 have had significant changes in the last decade or so, primarily bunker redevelopment.

Having expected to confirm my belief that natural golf courses are packed with subtle strength while more artificial and contrived designs are at times the devil’s work, I am delighted to say that as is so often the case, I was completely wrong. Golf is golf, and while it’s obviously a joy to play a design where the architect essentially placed the greens where they had to go and worked his way back to the right place for the tee such as Royal St David’s, it really can be just as enjoyable to play where the genius and vision of the designer has resulted in something different, unique and memorable - take a bow, Druid’s Glen. To my mind, there is room for both ends of the spectrum, and neither is essentially right or wrong.

I love Brora for all its old-school beauty, and I love The Grove for its inventiveness, conditioning and majesty. Some terrain actually demands development to make it interesting. Environmental concerns aside, then from a purely golfing perspective, we are lucky to enjoy courses crafted by nature, those developed by diggers and dynamite, and absolutely everything in between. Having sat on the out of bounds post for too long, I think that as a golfer, I am now happy to see the architect do as little, or as much, as it takes to create the best possible course for that specific location.

Changing The Landscape

Each of these young designs, very coincidentally all in Fife, proves that with modern construction techniques and a sympathetic eye, it really is possible to create an instant classic on reworked terrain.

Dumbarnie Links

Opened just six years ago, this brilliant blend of the old and the new features plenty of risk and reward. There is a superb quartet of beautifully framed par 3s with the front-nine pair offering distracting views over the firth, while the 14th plays over a marshy no-man’s-land, and the 16th has a rollercoaster green with the backdrop of the beach. You simply couldn’t know that 10 years ago this was gently-rolling farmland.

Kingsbarns

This supreme layout was designed by Kyle Phillips and opened for play in 2000. Rather than a traditional out-and-back routing, he created three sections to the course. The majority of the holes, the clubhouse and extensive practice facilities are in the centre, while two wings are home to holes 2 to 5 and 12 to 15. The course receives universal praise from its worldwide visitors.

St Andrews - The Castle Course

The Castle Course may divide opinion, but David McLay Kidd’s thoroughly modern 2008 alternative to the historic links at St Andrews is a real adventure along the clifftops and offers a hugely entertaining alternative. There are wonderful views out to sea and back over the town as well as some thrilling holes. The bunkering is very visual, there are some tricky greens, and the par-3 17th is a cracker.