Nature gift to Golf
Golf architecture is now recognized as distinct art, the creation of a great golf course being achieved with a subtle alchemy of skill, imagination and technology upon which another dimension of greatness can be conferred by the staging of a championship. But not every championship setting owes its quality to the hand man. St. Andrews, Prestwich and Carnoustie are relics of the old, natural links on which the first game became popular. To this day nobody knows who laid them out, but even they are refinements of the earliest golfing arenas used when the game was played across country. There were no fairways, no tees and no greens, simply agreed starting and finishing points.
The game had reached St. Andrews, Carnoustie, Lieth, Dornoch, Montrose, North Berwick and Mussel burgh by the beginning of the sixteenth century; Golf thus became established on links land. These trips of coastal lands, left when the seas receded after the last Ice Age, were once a wilderness of sand. Slowly, sparse vegetation grew up and something akin to a fairway with fine-bladed grass threaded its way amongst the gorse. St. Andrews became –and still is-one long fairway, with nine holes out to a distant point and nine holes back. Those unfamiliar with links courses expect it to have more definition and more color. Yet the old course’s influence on generations of golf architects has been immense-so pervasive that every golf course is essentially built in imitation.
The old course served as a model for the early architects, old Tom Morris, Willie Park Jr and Dunns, who in their early days did little more than site eighteen teeing grounds and greens on the splendid golfing ground that was put at their disposal. Unfortunately, for a period the blessings of nature were often overlooked and some courses took on a stiff and unnatural appearance. Designs incorporated stone walls, blind shots, hedges, regularly shaped mounds and greens in geometric shapes.
The Cardinal bunker dominates Prestwick’s 482-yard 3rd. The Cardinal, the fine sand of its face shored up by railway sleepers, is a double cross bunker, a type of hazard that the more predictable behavior of the gutta-percha ball made easier to site. Prestwick was opened in 1851, three years after the gutty was introduced, and since its extension in 1883 from twelve to eighteen holes it was changed very little. Rather, having been the succeeding eleven, it has become something of a golfing shrine.
The hidden bunkers that riddle the old course 12th fairway started out as natural sandy depressions and were probably enlarged by sheep sheltering from the wind. These, along with dune bunkers as shown left, crucially sited some 230 yards from the tee in the centre of Royal St George’s 4th fairway, are common on links courses where the first bunkers were not designed but evolved through use. The Swilcan Burn, around which the 1st at St. Andrews has evolved, is the essence of the simple but alarming natural hazard, confirming that the approach shot is the greatest test of a golfer’s ingenuity, judgment and nerve.
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