Parkland, Links and Seaside: How the Land Decides the Routing

Give the same practice three sites and you get three different golf courses. Not because the philosophy changes, but because routing is a response to ground, and ground is not negotiable. The courses that feel inevitable are the ones where the land was allowed to decide.

Parkland

Inland, treed, usually with real elevation and usually on soil rather than sand. The trees do the framing, which means the routing question is mostly about which corridors already exist and which can be opened without losing the character that made the site attractive.

Parkland asks more of drainage than any other type. Soil holds water, tree canopy keeps turf wet and shaded, and the gap between a parkland course that drains and one that does not is the difference between a nine month season and a twelve month one. Air movement matters as much as sunlight; greens boxed in by mature trees struggle regardless of how well they were built.

TPC at Jasna Polana in New Jersey and the North American portfolio more broadly sit in this tradition.

Links

Sand, wind, and almost no trees. The ground is firm, the ball runs, and the same hole plays two or three clubs differently depending on the day. Routing a links is largely about wind direction: a course where every hole runs the same way becomes monotonous in one wind and brutal in another, so holes are turned deliberately against each other.

Links ground rewards restraint. The dunes are the architecture. Heavy shaping on sand reads as false almost immediately, because the eye knows what wind-formed ground looks like.

The Links at Fancourt was built on inland ground and shaped into links character, which is the harder version of the exercise and the reason it is rated as highly as it is.

Seaside and clifftop

Often confused with links and quite different. Links is a soil type. Seaside is a view. A clifftop site brings salt, exposure and, usually, a small number of spectacular holes that everybody wants and that the routing has to earn its way to.

The temptation on a coastal site is to put every hole on the water. The better answer is usually to hold some back, so the holes that do reach the edge land as events rather than as the default. Thracian Cliffs on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast is routed this way.

Desert and arid sites

Water defines everything. Irrigated turf is limited by allocation, which means the routing has to be drawn around maintained corridors rather than wall to wall grass. Done well this produces strong definition, with turf against native desert. Done badly it produces a green ribbon that looks imported.

Saadiyat Beach in Abu Dhabi holds an Audubon International certificate for wildlife and habitat management, which on a site like that is as much a water story as a wildlife one.

Tournament venues, which cut across all of the above

A course that hosts a professional field has to be able to become harder without becoming unplayable for the members who fund it the rest of the year. That is a routing problem before it is a setup problem: tee positions that add real length, pin positions with genuine variety, and run-offs that punish a professional without destroying an amateur.

Gary Player Country Club has hosted the European Tour's Nedbank Golf Challenge every year since 1982 while operating as a resort course the rest of the time.

When a design ignores the ground

You can see it. Mounding that does not match the surrounding landform, greens perched where water will not leave, bunkers in places wind would never have put them, and a maintenance crew fighting the course rather than presenting it. It usually traces back to a routing drawn for something other than the site: real estate frontage, a yardage target, or a clubhouse position fixed before anyone walked the property.

Across four hundred projects in forty-one countries, the courses that have aged best are the ones where the ground got the first vote. Talk to us about a site.