49 British designer Adrian Stiff says that the bigger problems with a site are best resolved during the design and routing stage, rather than in construction, when things are likely to get expensive. “Every site presents different problems,” he says. “Getting over topographic issues, such as trying to find the best way to navigate steep land, is probably the toughest thing from a design point of view.” He cites Dainton Park, which he built in the early 1990s in south Devon, not far from Dartmoor, as his greatest challenge in that respect. “For me the first priority in routing is to create a course that is walkable, and obviously the more contoured the land, the harder that is,” he says. “Other issues come to light during construction. Poor soils or rock are hard to fix.” Sam Thomas, director of developments at GEO Foundation of Sustainable Golf, says: “What we have been most impressed by in terms of team creativity and golf architecture’s positive impact on land has probably been the regeneration of old, fallow, poor-quality agriculture or industrial land. Forgotten crop fields and sugar cane plantations that no longer pay their way, quarries that have had the easy material harvested – those are places that have been badly impacted by anthropogenic activities but are then healed through golf course creation and good land stewardship. “Golf is an elastic land use, and we view it as a potentially powerful green regeneration tool. Those awkward disrupted sites we have worked with over the past 10 years have seen transformations in real biodiversity jumps, reconnected habitat networks and renewed greenblue infrastructure networks that – alongside good golf – have breathed life back into the land and, in some instances, the communities of the places. We’ve seen this globally in places like Australia, Mauritius, St Kitts, Pakistan, Northern Ireland, Brazil and Sweden.” Photo:Dainton Golf Club When Adrian Stiff designed Dainton Park in Devon, UK, in the 1990s, his primary challenge was navigating steep land CHALLENGING SITES “ Golf is an elastic land use, and we view it as a potentially powerful green regeneration tool”
RkJQdWJsaXNoZXIy NzQ1NTk=