47 Photo: Darren Chisholm Gil Hanse’s Castle Stuart sets a high bar for modern British golf budget wasn’t enough, the client didn’t care. On and on. This was not a good course, not of the measure of a good English course that is in the top 100 (150 even) courses in the country. And it was on heavy soil but so is Augusta National. It was a bad course because the construction of the bunkers was inexcusably rudimentary. They were ugly. Fairway bunkers were poorly positioned, and the greenside bunkers were so far off the green they were irrelevant. The only one I raked all week was the one by the practice green. The front nine routing was decent enough because it was f lat ground, and it didn’t really matter where the holes went – it was just a matter of making good holes out of what there was to work with. There was ample space and beautiful trees perfectly dotted across the land asking to be used to make the golf interesting. The back nine was much different. The land was filled with interesting undulation. But one practice round and it was obvious (fair to say, more obvious to me than my player, who was just dealing with how to shoot the lowest score he could) there were much better holes to be had by teeing off the eighteenth green, finishing up on the tenth tee and playing the entire thing backwards. Every hole would have been better, but the reversed tenth wouldn’t have come back to the front of the hotel. Likely someone who didn’t know much about good golf suggested a finishing green on the tenth tee was too far from the clubhouse – or the architect never saw the other possibility. It’s fair to say MacKenzie et al weren’t bothered by such trivialities and it’s unanswerable what he might have done with the same site but fair to suggest he’d have done something unimaginably better. The years after the turn of the century have seen some excellent new golf in Australia and New Zealand. Gil Hanse’s Castle Stuart sets a high bar for modern British golf. Tom Weiskopf ’s Loch Lomond, Kyle Phillips’s Kingsbarns, and David McLay Kidd’s Queenwood and Beaverbrook are very good courses albeit on land not quite Sunningdale, Swinley Forest, Woking or Walton Heath. Whilst good sites are important and it’s true you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, the future of first-class golf is in the hands of dedicated and talented golf course architects. The evidence of the last couple of decades is that, finally, there is a group who’ve done as much to advance the game as the brilliant men – many of them British – who worked between the two world wars. Dark Ages are sometimes worthwhile – even necessary. We can learn much from bad courses as they serve to illustrate why courses built in more enlightened times were so worthwhile. GCA Mike Clayton is a former touring professional, a golf architect and partner at Clayton, DeVries & Pont M I KE CL AY TON
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