The Himalayas bunker complex on the sixth hole at St Enodoc in Cornwall is one of golf’s most fearsome hazards. Now, it is even more fearsome, after being restored to a single bunker and its 1930s shape by architect Clyde Johnson of Cunnin’ Golf Design, who was supported on the project by agronomist Chris Haspell.

Johnson first went to St Enodoc in 2016 with his mentor Tom Doak; Doak had been hired by the club, of which he has long been an outspoken fan, to report on its design and offer suggestions for improvement. “The idea was that Tom would come up with ideas, and I would help with implementing them,” says Johnson.

But progress at St Enodoc has been slow. Johnson reworked the tee complex on the home hole in 2019 and did some more tee work, along with some bunkers, last winter, but it is only now that he has been able to get his teeth into the course’s most famous feature. “St Enodoc is a great course in a great landscape,” he says. “You don’t want to reduce its charm by overpolishing it. We now have a nice programme of works that we can implement over several years.”

The Himalayas bunker has gone through many different iterations since the club was founded in 1890. “At the start of the twentieth century, it was really open and sandy,” says Johnson. “By the mid-1930s, it was fairly formalised as a single bunker with a long tail – that was the inspiration for what we have put back. It shrank over the years, and when we visited in 2016, the lower tail had been split up and turned into a pot bunker. It was very difficult for a lot of golfers – especially ladies – to get out of it, and foot traffic going past the complex on the left caused all sorts of problems with the turf.”

A photo of the Himalayas bunker from 1938 (Image: St Enodoc Golf Club)

Johnson’s solution was to tear into a large dune on the left side and use the material to raise the bowl that was short left of the Himalayas bunker. “By doing that we were able to make the area more playable and give ten or fifteen yards more space to get golfers through that area,” he explains. As part of this work, Johnson has reshaped the bunker complex back into a single, more visually impactive hazard, in a shape inspired by 1930s photography of the hole.

“Over the last ten years, the club has been trying to stabilise the upper face of the bunker with chicken wire, so we were fairly pragmatic about expanding that area,” he explains. “It would have looked unbelievable, but would have been extremely tough to maintain. The work we have done has expanded the sand area by about fifty per cent, while making the bottom part of the bunker more playable.”