Working my way through the 3 Ws of Surrey we come to West Hill, a Willie Park Jr. course which was the third of the three that I played but I felt the second-best of the bunch. I think that the general wisdom is that West Hill is the least of the three, with Woking first and Worplesdon second. But almost all would probably admit that it’s a fairly close race between them. Each course has substantial strengths. In the case of West Hill, the foundation is a very good, rolling property that results in several unusual but interesting holes and a few more standard, but indisputably excellent ones.

Like many of the other best English courses, West Hill looks fairly short on the card, stretching to just over 6,300 yards. But also like many of these ‘short’ English courses, the par is less than 70, in this case 69. I came to really like courses with par<70 because they all have at least 5 par 3s, which I’ve come to be convinced all courses should have. While many point to Augusta National’s mix of 4 par 3s, 4 par 5s, and 10 par 4s adding up to par 72 (with perfect alternation, at least on the front nine), my ideal is the Addington: 6 par 3s (of varying lengths), 3 par 5s, and 9 par 4s for a par of 69. Two of the best courses in England, Rye and West Sussex essentially have no par 5s for long hitters, which would make them par 67s.

But the focus here is West Hill, which has what’s probably the standard approach to par 69 of 5 par 3s and 2 par 5s. As typical in the neighborhood, the par 3s are an excellent and varied bunch, requiring everything from a short-iron/wedge up to a hybrid. But I would say that the class of the course is probably its set of 10 par 4s, which is quite varied. They range from drivable (13; and not just for the longest hitters), to brutally long (3, 14). There are several blind shots in the bunch and they often aren’t on the easiest holes (like the drive on 3). The course ultimately manages to squeeze a lot of interesting and varied golf into a very small property. It’s also one of the best conditioned courses that I played—I played in March and the greens were faster and the fairways in better condition than most courses that I played in the UK in the summer.


Having praised West Hill’s set of par 4s, unfortunately we start with its least praiseworthy: a 390 blind driving hole where the fairway runs out at about 260 and tumbles into a drainage ditch. Really you should only hit your drive about 240 because the fairway slopes steeply toward the ditch. The hole played fine in the winter but would be very awkward in the summer as you’d have to lay even further back to prevent the roll. You’d need 300+ to carry the ditch, so that isn’t really an alternative for most.

I also wasn’t too impressed with the 370 yard second but it is a good test of driving, with staggered bunkers right and left at ~225 and ~245. The approach is to a fairly wide green that looks like it has a lot of bunkers around it, but most of these are well back.

West Hill really starts to get going with the 470 yard third. This is just a great long par 4. Again, the drive is blind over a diagonal berm which conceals important information: that the fairway slopes left-to-right. A drive that leaks right can end up behind an oak tree or, if you push it right, could kill someone on the fourth green. So you need to either hug the left side or hit a draw.

I’d recommend (if capable) trying whichever of the two you can hit further because you’ll want as short of an approach as you can get. The second is over a creek to a small green that slopes pretty good from right-to-left. For good players, the creek should only be an issue if you pull your approach because it isn’t too tight to the green. The safe play is to hedge short and right.

Four is the first of 5 fine par 3s. This one plays about 200 yards from the tips, but the green is very receptive, both in terms of its opening in front and the slope. Just don’t miss right.

One of only two par 5s, the 500 yard fifth is a lovely up-and-over hole where you drive (hopefully) to the crest of a hill and then play your second downhill to the green. The fairway is bisected by heather at about 275 so long hitters will have to layup. But it was a perfect driving hole for me because you need to hit in the 240-250 range to have a view of the green on your second, putting a premium on a solid shot—as so many uphill shots do.

The approach is a beauty, running gently downhill to another receptive green. But there’s good challenge for those going for the green in the form of bunkers left and right about 40 yards short. The layup is wide-open but it’s a really good shot for those who can go for the green.

The 415 yard sixth features the third blind drive in the first six holes. It takes about 220 to crest the hill from the tips, making it a demanding drive for shorter hitters. For long hitters, the bigger issue (at least in the summer) is a blind bunker about 315 out. Although they could chew it up in the winter, I’d imagine that West Hill can be quite tricky for long hitters in the summer as there are a lot of places where they can run out of room.

The approach to the green is a beauty and demands a bit more accuracy than some of the previous ones.

Seven is a ~170 yard par 3, sternly bunkered at the front and front-right. The green isn’t particularly wide, so accuracy is required.

Although there are some very good holes in the opening stretch, the 400 yard eighth is where West Hill really started to come alive for me. It’s a good (and very attractive) driving hole with a bunker left at about 210 and then bunkers encroaching further down on the right. The approach is very challenging, fronted completely by bunkers. Still, if you’ve hit a good drive, it should be manageable because the green is deep and receptive.

Like most of the heathland courses, the greens aren’t a standout at West Hill. But there are exceptions, most notably the 175 yard ninth. Bunkers short right and left create some pressure (you really don’t want to go long), but the most interesting thing about the hole is the wandering tier in the middle of the green. It’s especially challenging to stick on on the small back tier but even if you do, you’re not going to have a flat putt.

I’ve seen many two-tiered greens and they’re usually not interesting because the tiers themselves are flat. That isn’t true here; both tiers have good interior contour, making this an excellent green.

Nine is an excellent hole. I think that the long par 4 tenth (420 yards) is even better. For me, this hole easily sits with some of the other great tenth holes in Surrey, like those at St. George’s Hill and the Old Course at Sunningdale. It’s a model of employing bunkering to create both strategy and deception.

The drive is a fairly narrow corridor through trees…actually I’m glad I played it in the winter because with leaves and firm fairways, it would be uncomfortably narrow. But the main driving feature is a small bunker about 270 yards out on the left. This is exactly where you want to drive it. From here, in typical Colt fashion (although he didn’t design it), there are staggered bunkers starting short-left and running up the right side of the green. The green is angled from front-left to back-right and is narrow. So an approach from the right side of the fairway, especially if you haven’t hit a long drive, is very difficult.

Eleven is a peculiar hole, but one that I like. The issue here is that it’s about 390 from the tips, but 240 is the absolute furthest you can drive it before the fairway runs out. There’s plenty of space short of this, although the fairway runs out a bit quicker on the left than the right.

Some may not love the semi-blind approach but it was one of my favorites. And that’s because the green is lay-of-the-land, something for which I’m a huge sucker. Given that the land slopes away here, the green also slopes away. So distance control is at a premium.

Interesting note: the fairway has rig-and-furrow shaping, long, shallow trenches. You also see this at Sunningdale and Liphook. This is a farming remnant. It adds character wherever you find it.

Now we come to a hole that I’d suspect is a favorite—yet the bane—of many: the drivable par 4 twelfth. And this one is really drivable—only about 280 from the tips. But there are bunkers absolutely everywhere starting at about 190 yards. The smart play is to pick a club that’ll keep you short of the bunkers on the left at about 220.

The green is another two-tier-er and the back tier is very shallow. I don’t remember how the rest of the green was (and unfortunately I didn’t get a close-up) but that’s probably because when the pin is at the back, it captures your full attention.

​Thirteen is the short par 3, only about 135 yards but to a well-bunkered green. Back-right pins are especially tricky here.

If there’s one hole at West Hill that people complain about, it’s probably the 450 yard par 4 four fourteenth. It’s just a very awkward hole. The reason is that it’s a short dogleg to the right; if you aim straight down the fairway, it runs out at about 230 yards. Aim at the edge of the tree line and hit it straight and you run out of fairway and into a bunker (protecting those on the sixteenth tee) at 250. So you need to hit something high along the tree line with a fade. Actually, it’s a really good challenge for good players and there is room if you pull it off.

Somewhat awkward drive aside, all must admit that the second is a beauty. There are several cross bunkers about 100 yards short of the green that can create a lot of trouble if you’ve hit a short drive. But the run into the green from there is wide open, befitting such a long par 4 with a difficult drive. I wish I had gotten a picture of the green because I remember is as another lay-of-the-land beauty, like eleven.

It’s a controversial hole, but I think it’s a good one.

I think there’d be more consensus that the 210 yard par 3 fifteenth is a very good hole. Nothing tricky here, you just need to hit a solid long-iron/hybrid to carry the diagonal stretch of bunkers that runs from short-left to long-right. The green is plenty large enough and open in front, but let it leak a bit right and you’ll be bunkered.

Like on one, you have to be careful not to hit your drive on sixteen too far because the fairway runs out into a ditch at about 275. But the hole is only 380 so you don’t need to go any further than about 250 anyway. The uphill approach to a green fronted by another string of diagonal bunkers running from short-left up its right side is one of the most attractive on the course.

The par 5 seventeenth (540 tips/510 yellow tees) has a bit of an awkward drive but this time you can see enough of what’s going on. The driving challenge comes in the form of staggered bunkers, about 230 out on the right and 250 out on the left. Again, the fairway runs out into heather, but not until about 290 this time.

The approach is semi-blind but you can see the one feature that you really need to know about: the right fairway bunker about 80 yards short of the green. Unless you’re going for the green, you should just layup short of it. From here, it’s a simple approach to a large green with plenty of room in front.

The 435 yard eighteenth is one of the toughest finishing holes in Surrey. And it’s not because of the drive, which is one of the most wide-open on the course. But although you can’t tell from the tee, it’s much better to be up the left-side than the right-side here. That’s because the green is narrow and well-protected at its right side.

I don’t remember the green as being particularly interesting but still, I wish I had gotten a closer picture. One of the most notable things about this green is that the practice green is just about 10 yards to its right. I wouldn’t be surprised if as many people hit the practice green with their approach as the real one (I did…).

It’s been awhile since I thought about West Hill (and six years since I played it) but going through my pictures, it clearly made an impression on me as I remembered a lot of what I thought about it at the time. I remembered thinking in my first round that the course got off to a slow start but then realizing that it was only the first two holes—no one would describe three or four as weak holes.

I would have sworn that because of the bunkering scheme, the course had been designed by Colt, but there’s no mention of any major architect other than Park having had a hand in the course. Knowing that, I guess that I can see Park’s hand in some of the lay-of-the-land green complexes and the willingness to allow blind shots. But the diagonal bunkering doesn’t really remind me of Park’s work on either Sunningdale’s Old Course or at Stoneham and it reminds me very much of Colt’s work at St. George’s Hill and on the Sunningdale New Course. Perhaps Park’s approach to bunkering changed depending on the site? I’ll leave that to the architectural historians.

I have a hard time getting too worked up about golf course architecture history but clearly I love analyzing golf course architecture. And whoever designed it, they did a fine job with West Hill. It’s very well bunkered and has great variety in the green complexes—some quite undulating with mounded edges, others fitting very simply in their surroundings. The holes fall over the land in a varied way as well with several uphill, blind shots but also many lovely downhill ones. Although there’s only one hole that I’d describe as world class (ten), there are a handful of very good par 3s and par 4s, each different from the other. All-in-all, it’s a course that I’d be happy to play regularly and certainly holds its own in a competitive neighborhood for great golf.

I’ve been meaning for awhile to write reviews of the famous ‘3 Ws’ of Surrey: West Hill, Woking, and Worplesdon. These courses, which are all neighbors, feature prominently on lists of the best courses in England and the best heathland courses. There’s been a lot of debate over ranking the three. Generally Woking comes out on top because it has, pretty indisputably, the best greens of the three. But my impression after a few plays of each is that it was also on the least interesting land of the three. Still, I’d agree with the consensus that it’s the best of them.

I’m starting with Worplesdon because my recollection after having played all three of them that my ordering would be Woking>West Hill>Worplesdon. But I didn’t play West Hill until a year after I played Woking and Worplesdon and there might have been some recency bias with respect to West Hill vs. Worplesdon because there was a lot that I liked about the former.

But there was also a lot that I liked about the latter. So my next three reviews are also going to be a test of whether going over all of it again, I feel the same way about the ordering. My memory of golf hole features tends to be pretty good, but it helps that I have a good set of pictures of all three. I also saw them all, at least for the first time, in late winter/early spring, so the conditions were comparable.
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I’m not really into architectural history and I was under the impression that Worplesdon, like The Addington and Knole Park, was the work of J.F. Abercromby. But I saw a list recently of Willie Park Jr. courses that included it. Looking at the club’s website, it looks like Abercromby routed the course and Park Jr. shaped the greens and bunkers. There’s certainly a lot to like about both of these aspects of the course although I’ll also note at the outset that these greens and bunkers have a bit more flair than some of the other Park Jr. work that I’ve seen at Sunningdale and Stoneham. That makes me a bit suspect whether all of it is original but I certainly don’t want to do the research to find out. So I’ll leave aside the provenance of all of this and judge it on what I see to be its merits.

And that leaves a plenty enough interesting a task because there’s a lot of great stuff at Worplesdon. The course seems to be mostly known for its set of five par 3s and the back-to-back par 5s on the back nine. I certainly agree that the par 3s are a noteworthy set and that 11 and 12 are fine holes. But I actually think that some of the other holes might be even better. Generally, the bunkering is bold and there are several greens with some serious internal contour. Although they’re not as artistic as those at Woking, it’s probably one of the more challenging sets of greens of the heathland courses.


The first is a straight-away short par 4 that falls gently to the fairway then rises back uphill to the green. I didn’t take this picture from the tee but the bunkers on the left were about 240 to clear (from the ~6,450 yard back tees). On Google Earth, it looks like the club has added another bunker near the trees on the right, ~270 out.

I didn’t get a picture of the green but I remember it as large and interesting, sloping generally back-to-front.

I really like the 400 yard second hole. I’m a sucker for this kind of funky, blind drive where the blindness comes from a rise right in front of the tee. Most architects today would just have you walk 80 yards to the point where it isn’t blind. But anyone who has played the Addington won’t be surprised that Abercromby didn’t do that—he didn’t seem to care so much about helping golfers out.

It’s a great driving hole too because you can tell that the hole bends to the left and that there are trees right. So you’d suspect that you need to hit a draw. Yes. The fairway slopes left-to-right and if you don’t execute the drive, it’s easy to end up in the trees. This drive might get a bit hairy when things are firm in the summer but it worked very well in March. In winter/spring, there’s an issue of hitting it far enough so that you don’t get stuck on the side of the hill, which would make the uphill approach brutal.

Three is a mid-length, downhill par 4 with one main feature: a bunker in the center of the fairway about 290 out. This wasn’t an issue for me given the lack of bounce and I found the hole quite tame. But it would be an issue for long hitters and might be an issue for me in the summer because the fairway slopes toward it.

Four is the first of an excellent set of par 3s. Three of them are uphill, this one by far the most of the bunch. Google Earth says that it plays 11 meters uphill—so almost 40 feet! That seems right and I found that I had to take two extra clubs over the yardage. The green is shallow with a pretty good false front. Tough, but really good hole.

The first four holes are loop back to the clubhouse and the fifth tee is right next to it…which resulted in a 50 hole day for me because they started me here in my first round. It was a tough starting hole, much tougher than the first.

It’s probably the narrowest fairway on the course. There are bunkers on both sides of the fairway starting at 240 and the right rough is all heather. The approach is to a large, undulating green with an interesting dip running across the front. These stand out in my mind but apparently I didn’t take pictures of them. Worplesdon was one of the first courses that I played in the UK, so I was still learning about how to photograph a course.

And it looks like I didn’t take any pictures of the sixth, a short, left doglegging par 5. The fairway was pretty wide between scattered bunkers and the second was open, running downhill to the green. I remember it as being a pretty easy hole.

Its green surrounded by bunkers, I didn’t think that the par 3 seventh was an easy hole. Like several greens, this one is two-tiered and front pins are pretty accessible for a decent short iron player.

Eight is another fairly short par 4 with a semi-blind drive. There’s a bunker about 230 out on the left that you can’t see well. If you can carry it, you can probably get pretty close to the green in the summer.

This is another two-tiered green, probably the course’s most severe. I didn’t get a close-up, but you can even see the severity of the tier from about 150 yards out in the fairway. The back plateau is also quite small with death over the back. So it’s a tough hole with the pin in the back but should be pretty easy with it in the front.

Nine is another mid-length par 4 and a bit of an awkward hole. But it was an awkward hole that I still liked. The main trouble is down the right in the form of trees. Because that’s where the trouble is, you’d think that you’d want to cut this side for the best angle. Not true. You might be able to get closer to the green, but the best angle in is from the left because the green angles front-left to back-right around a bunker at its front right. It might be a bit too tight with leaves on the trees, but it worked for me.

Probably the best green on the course is on the short par 3 tenth. The shot over the pond is certainly one of the prettiest on the course but that’s nothing compared to the beauty of the green, which had multiple small tiers. I wish I had gotten a close-up of it.

The next four holes are on the other side of a two-lane highway which creates two of the most dangerous road crossings that I’ve seen on a golf course, with poor visibility on both sides and cars coming at 50+ mph. Now that they’ve rerouted Liphook to avoid was I thought was the #1 most dangerous road crossing, this walk from 10-11 is the most dangerous remaining one that I’ve seen on a golf course.

If you’ve survived and reached the eleventh tee, you’re in for the best stretch of holes on the course. The back-to-back par 5s eleven and twelve have received much praise. My praise is a bit more reserved. They’re both beautiful holes, but they’re not as interesting as many others that I’ve seen.

Actually, I think that the eleventh would be a very interesting hole for shorter hitters. The main feature on the drive is a bunker that cuts well into the right half of the fairway. But it’s only about a 215 yard carry.

The second is over a similarly prominent bunker, but it’s only about 375 to get past this one. After that, you just need to avoid a big oak tree in the right rough. The green is deep and probably better approached from the right, but I didn’t find the angle to be so important.

Twelve is a much tougher driving hole for longer hitters. This time there are several bunkers up the right side and it’s about 280 to pass them from the tips. It’s definitely reachable at 510…although not for me in late winter. If you’re laying up, it’s a bit of an awkward one to a blind landing area. But it’s plenty wide. I liked the trench bunker at the front-right of the green, which favors an approach from the left.

The ~190 yard par 3 thirteenth is both a beautiful and a great par 3. The green is narrow but deep and ringed with sand in the front half. I’ve seen recent photos and it looks like the club has made this into one continuous bunker around the front. I liked the look of the various odd bunkers before but perhaps this is a restoration. The green pitches pretty good from back-to-front with a tier in the back.

I thought that the long par 4 fourteenth (~460 yards), the last hole on this side of the highway, was the course’s best. There’s a pretty good amount of room off the tee but the hole turns gently left and you want to stay near the line of the left fairway bunker, which is about a 240 yard carry on its right side.

On the approach, the main feature is a bunker in the middle of the fairway about 30 yards short of the green. It definitely comes into play if you haven’t hit a long drive and if you’re in the right side of the fairway, it obscures the direct line to the green. I didn’t get a shot of the green unfortunately, but there are bunkers on both sides. This hole really rewards someone who keeps both their drive and approach on the straight and narrow.

The second road crossing isn’t as bad as the first because the visibility is better. But what’s unusual here is that we have about a 240 yard walk from the fourteenth green to the fifteenth tee. You don’t see that too often on British courses.

But it didn’t bother me because this only happens once and the hole on the other side, a short par 5, is a fine hole. Like eleven, the major feature here is a bunker up the right side that only takes about 215 to carry. But there’s much more danger here; if you hedge left, there’s junk up the left side of the fairway. So it’s best to go over the middle or the right edge of the bunker.

The land past the bunker runs downhill and you can have a pretty short approach into this green. If I remember correctly, I birdied it all three times that I played it. So it’s probably fair to think of it as a long par 4.

Like four and seven, sixteen is an uphill par 3. It’s a bit visually confusing because the two big mound of heather in front are about 40 ft. short of the green. I remember that the green slope back-to-front, but not any further details.

The 400 yard seventeenth probably qualifies as a sleeper hole. The visibility from the tee is a bit poor. You can see that there are multiple bunkers up the right, but not how far away they are. They progressively narrow the fairway at 210, 250, and 290 making this a good driving hole for everyone.

The approach to the green looks simple enough with standard bunkering at the front-right and left. But the green is another of the most interesting on the course, two-tiered but with the back, upper tier kind-of horseshoeing around the lower front one. Another green that I wish I had a picture of. This is probably one of the 3 or 4 best holes on the course.

I said at the beginning that I’d be reassessing the 3 Ws as I write about them because I haven’t thought about them in awhile. Thinking through Worplesdon, I’m realizing that the greens are a lot better than I remember…even though I didn’t get good pictures of any of them.

The eighteenth is an elegant long par 4 finisher. It’s quite easy off the tee but the approach is Colt-esque over diagonal bunkers that start 40 yards short of the green and run up its right side. These bunkers probably get as much action as any on the course.

I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t have much negative to say about Worplesdon and I did have a lot that was positive. I can see why I thought that. Although some of them have achieved some recognition, I think that the par 5s are a bit weak. Eleven could really use another 40 yards but there’s no room with houses behind the tee. Actually you could just call 6 and 15 par 4s, which would reduce the course to a tough par 69. But the par 3s are as good as advertised individually, if a bit similar to each other in length. And there are some excellent par 4s in the mix.

The bunkering is well-placed and beautifully shaped. There’s ample heather both around these bunkers and between the holes. I don’t know if the bunkers had been recently reconstructed and the heather added like I noted about Stoneham, but they looked very good. Thinking through my memories of each hole, the greens are better than I had remembered with my only criticism being that a few too many are two-tiered. Although I wouldn’t make too firm a judgment not having seen these courses for several years, I’d wager that they were one of the 5 most interesting sets on a heathland course.

So Worplesdon holds up very well in my look back and I wouldn’t be surprised if after reviewing West Hill next, that it moves to second place in my mind among the 3 Ws, which appears to be the conventional wisdom.

I haven’t written up any of the courses that I played in England in awhile but it’s time to dip into the back catalogue because there are some excellent ones that I’ve left off. I’ve decided to start with Stoneham, a 1908 Willie Park Jr. design because it’s easily the most under-appreciated of the bunch. The reason for this is simple: it isn’t in the London suburbs. It’s about two hours southwest, just outside of Southampton. But it’s a heathland course (or at least they’re trying to make it one by planting heather), so it belongs in the discussion with those. And among those in southeastern England, it certainly belongs in a discussion of which of these are among the best.

The first thing to note about this course is that it’s very hilly, hillier than all of the great London heathland courses except maybe St. George's Hill. But the routing makes beautiful use of this tough property. I’m always amazed that the old greats could take a difficult property like this and build something that’s completely walkable with several great holes and no bad ones that recent architects’ takes on easier properties can’t even accomplish one or two of these.

But part of the reason why Stoneham works so well is that Park, like all the great old British architects, was ok with building holes that we might find a bit suspect today. Extremely hilly corner of a property? Build back-to-back par 3s. Have a severe slope in the middle of the property? Eh, route a long par 4 along it…a weak drive will kick left and leave a long approach while a good one will kick forward and leave a much shorter one. There are, of course, some tricky uphill holes, but why is this frowned upon while marsh and ponds everywhere are ok? An uphill hole is a real test of hitting the ball solidly, which is an important skill.

There’s also an elegance to this routing, with the front nine working generally counter-clockwise around the outside of the property and the back nine moving back and forth across its interior. The whole property has tremendous contour and the course’s use of it reaches its zenith with a set of par 5s in the middle of the back nine that fall as beautifully over their stretches of land as any course that I’ve seen. Combine this with Park Jr.’s minimalist green construction (similar to his work at Sunningdale) and you have a course that’s as good an expression of its land as just about any that I’ve seen.

Note: This review draws several pictures from the club’s website, which has excellent pictures of the holes. Looking through these, I see that they’ve done a lot of work to the bunkers since my visit. Where this is significant, I’ll show both and discuss how I think the changes might have affected the holes.


Like Park Jr.’s Old Course at Sunningdale, Stoneham starts with a short par 5. It’s about a 200 yard carry to reach the top of the first hill. For good players, the bigger challenge is a bunker about 275 out on the left. While it looks just as close, the one on the right is 70 yards further out.

The approach is slightly downhill to a simple built-up green with bunkers at its front-right and left. It’s a pretty inviting first hole…as long as you hit it straight.

I thought that the ~190 yard par 3 second was the weakest on the course but looking at the website, it looks like they’ve redone the bunkering since I’ve been there. It looks much better now. Still, this land slopes away but the green is built-up to slope back-to-front, which I generally don’t like. I wonder if the green pad is original?

Three is a tough short par 4, tough because this time it takes almost 250 from the tips to clear the ridge in the fairway. The ball can also kick left if you’re in the left side, toward what centuries-old oak tree in the left rough. The first of many holes where the contour of the fairway plays an important role in how you need to think about your drive.

Another of these holes is the long par 4 fourth, the aforementioned long par 4 playing along a hill. This is a hole that you’d never see in the states. I played the course in May and it was tough because the fairway was soft enough that you weren’t guaranteed a kick to the base of the hill. With firm fairways in the summer, it might be tough to keep your ball from kicking forward into a creek 325 from the tee.

Whatever time of year it is, the gradually uphill approach to the lay-of-the-land green is one of the best in southeastern England.

Five is a somewhat-awkward 325 yard par 4. A long hitter could get pretty close to the green if they carry the bunker on the right with a fade. But it’s difficult to hit enough of a fade to keep yourself from ending up short and left of the green, which isn’t a place that I’d recommend; it’s a super-awkward pitch to a narrow green that slopes left-to-right. The smartest thing to do here is just hit it 200 yards from the tee, then hit a wedge. It’d be a bit less awkward if they trimmed the trees on the right, but I don’t mind the awkwardness as a complication for someone who’s playing the hole aggressively.

Six is another short par 5 (~500 yards, like most English par 5s) where the landing area is not visible from tee. The drive is awkward because there are hidden bunkers at 260 on the right and 290 on the left. Looking back at my pictures, I’m realizing that they’ve also changed the bunkering scheme here because when I played, the one on the right was further out.

But the most noteworthy thing about this hole was the awkward approach, which doesn’t look to have changed. Unless you can get it within about 50 yards of the green, you’ll be shooting blind from a valley. The bunkering around the green has changed a bit in style (more heather around them), but not in placement.

The par 3 seventh is an example of one of my favorite types of holes: a long par 3 where you can use the slope of the ground to run the ball on the green. This one is also semi-blind but you can tell from the general slope of the land off the tee enough about what’s going on. There’s a blind bunker short-left of the green but it’s not a bad spot if you end up there.

Eight is the second of the aforementioned back-to-back par 3s in the tough corner of the property. Like five and six at West Sussex, its a nice pair because seven is long (~230) while eight is medium length (~165). It appears that the club has done some work here since my visit, splitting the front bunker into two and adding heather around the edges.

The ~380 yard ninth is another nice example of ‘well, we’ll just have to do the best we can with the land’ and the result is an interesting hole. The fairway crests at about 250, then it’s all downhill into the green. But you have to be careful.

​I see that the club has added a bunker on the right since my visit, which makes the drive a bit tougher. At the same time, without the bunker, if you hit a push, it was possible to run into the woods on the right because the land right of the fairway slopes left-to-right.

Ten is another fine par 3, about 185 yards to a narrow green, which requires a precise mid-long iron shot.

I suspect that the 400 yard eleventh is one of the most controversial holes on the course because the approach is all carry over a stream valley to a very shallow green. I’m not a big fan of greens benched into hillsides like this, but it’s a different and more demanding kind of shot for this course. The bushes behind the green have been cleared and replaced with heather since my visit, definitely an improvement.

The par 5 twelfth begins the best three hole stretch on this course and one of the best that I’ve seen anywhere. It starts with another semi-blind drive, but one with plenty of room and no hidden bunkers (unless you can hit it into the cross-bunkers 350 out). Still, you either need to hit a draw or drive up the left side because the ball will run right into the trees if you miss over there.

The approach is one of the best-looking that I’ve ever seen, over beautiful cross-bunkers, down hill with the ground sweeping left-to-right. But you also need to be careful because if you get one running a bit right, there’s a big ditch filled with junk. And if you’re short and left, the angle into the green will be awkward. So it’s no dumb beauty.

Thirteen is the course’s drivable par 4, only 275 from the tips. Yet it’s seriously challenging if you get even a bit offline because the green is very narrow. This is actually one of the only holes that I’ve played that’s improved by its cart path—it provides the aiming point for the drive. Really, it’s probably best to lay back at least 50 or 60 yards here because it’s just such a difficult shot if you go for it and miss wide.

Fourteen, a par 5 of ~480 yards, is another beauty. The drive is not the course’s most interesting but the approach is both that and one of the course’s most beautiful. The great thing about the approach is how the land feeds into it. There’s a rise short and left of the green and if you haven’t hit the longest drive, you can still use this to feed the ball on. If you miss right, a valley catches your ball. It’s a very short and easy par 5 for long hitters but this option makes it a very interesting reachable par 5 for the rest of us.

This was one of my favorite holes in southeastern England.

This excellent back-and-forth stretch continues with the fifteenth, a 425 yard par 4. This is one of the toughest holes on the course because the fairway gets much narrow about 270 out and you’re likely to have a handing lie in the fairway. The green is open and receptive so if you haven’t hit your best, it might be smart to hedge to the front.

I loved the look of the trench bunker in front of the short par 3 sixteenth hole’s narrow green. Unfortunately the club has turned this into three small bunkers. Perhaps it creates aesthetic consistency with the other bunker renovations, but that isn’t a good enough reason to do it. Aesthetic consistency is important but when a feature looks good in its own right, it shouldn’t be changed just to improve aesthetic consistency across the course.

Seventeen, along with two and eighteen, is a lesser hole. The problem is caused by the trees just off the right side of the tee box. They block the right side of the fairway, pushing you to the left, where the club has planted some ugly American maple trees in the rough. I’d lose the first tree off the tee on the right and the ones in the left rough.

The approach is much better, over a winding stream with bunkers on the hill to the right. It’s one of the course’s loveliest green settings. It’s a shame that the drive is so awkward because this is otherwise a fine hole.

It looks to me like the short, uphill par 5 eighteenth has undergone some changes. It was a bit of a dull slog when I played it. But it appears that the club has removed all of the trees on the left to expand the practice area and has added two staggered fairway bunkers, 230 out on the left and 275 out on the right. This appears to have made it a much tougher, but much more interesting driving hole. It also looks like the club has added a bunker about 60 yards short of the green on the left, enhancing what had been a dull approach.

Unlike the other holes, where the changes haven’t made much of a substantive difference, it looks like the bunker additions and tree clearing have significantly improved this one.

Stoneham was a bit of a trek for me because it’s about 75 miles from London’s Victoria Station. Fortunately, there’s an express train that stops near here so it was only about four train stops and a short cab ride. Still an easy day trip. I’m glad that I did it because this course is a serious contender for a place at the lower end of the top tier of heathland courses with company like Walton Heath’s New Course and Woking. I preferred it to some of the other, more renowned heathland courses like the Addington (although renovations appear to have made it much better), Hankley Common, and Worplesdon.

What to say about Willie Park Jr.’s design style? It’s a bit more minimalistic than Colt’s, with less shaping around the greens. These greens tend to be simple, built-up pads, like those at Park Jr.’s Battle Creek CC in Michigan. Owing probably to the severity of the land, some of these are quite built-up, like the ninth.

I’m not sure what Park Jr.’s bunker style looked like though because the club has redone many of the bunkers. While the new bunkers look good in their own right, I suspect that they are not consistent with the original style. If I had to, I’d guess that the more trench-like bunkers like that (previously) on sixteen and those with built-up ridges in front of them, like the cross-bunker on twelve are original. These remind me of Fowler’s work at Walton Heath and a bit of some of the bunkers at Sunningdale, although again there, it’s difficult to tell what’s Park and what’s Colt.

Like old country club courses in the US, there’s been a lot of work recently on England’s classic courses. But unlike the US, where the trend has been to try to restore the original designs, there seems to be more ‘modernization’ in these English course renovations. I don’t think that I like it. While I’m fine with building bunkers in new places because the old ones don’t provide a sufficient challenge, I don’t understand why these renovating architects don’t try to shape these in the style of the originals. I’m not averse to modernization if what was there in the first place wasn’t great, but I don’t understand it when what was there probably was.

It seems like most of these clubs are enthralled with putting heather around the bunker edges to give their course the ‘heathland’ look because heathland courses are higher status than ‘parkland’ courses, always an issue in a country where status hierarchy is so important (which they try to downplay). As far as I can tell, there’s no fundamental difference between a heathland course and a parkland course except that the former has heather and a few more pine trees. Sure there’s an ecological difference—the former has acidic soil and the latter doesn’t—but that doesn’t matter much for golf in itself. There’s no systematic difference in the topography of these types of land. Some of these clubs are going overboard with the eye-candy heather, which can be functional in a bad way (you carry a bunker just to end up in it).

I’d prefer it if these renovations focused more on capturing the original styling of the bunkers. To me, it’s a bit ironic that the historically more progressive US is emphasizing restoration while clubs in the more historically-minded UK are modernizing. It’s a bit unfair that I’m putting this in my Stoneham review because Stoneham isn’t the worst offender (cough…cough…Swinley Forest). Most of the changes here appear to have improved their respective holes (though emphatically not number sixteen). Still, there aren’t too many notable Park Jr. courses in the UK and it would be nice if one of the best examples of his work there were presented in its original style.

Trying to book a tee time at the newly opened American Dunes earlier this year was a real lesson in just how much more popular golf, and in particular destination golf has become since the beginning of the covid pandemic. I had, of course, like every other golfer spent almost the previous year struggling to get tee times as I adjusted too slowly to the fact that now you need to know where you want to play and when well in advance. No more last minute Saturday morning bookings at your favorite course.

The plan was to arrange a booking for eight people because several of my golf buddy Bob’s friends had seen the extensive promotional material for American Dunes and wanted to come. It was early May. We were trying to book for the end of June, so this was 6-7 weeks out. All that I was able to get was a slot for two people on a Tuesday morning. This was just as well by me because it’s always irritating to plan for multiple people. And we were even able to get a second slot in the afternoon. So Bob and I made American Dunes the centerpiece of a short four course trip to southwestern Michigan (plus the Warren Course, Hawkshead, and the Ravines…don’t bother with the latter two).

Now American Dunes is different from your usual course because it was developed as a home and fundraiser for Folds for Honor, an organization that supports military veterans. This isn’t just some additional fact about the place, it’s its core. To enter the clubhouse from the parking lot, you walk through a concrete wall corridor with plaques that share stories of military men and women who died during our recent military conflicts. Everything here is infused with the military. At the beginning of the round, they give you a nickel and you’re supposed to throw it at the base of an air force memorial near the eighteenth tee, a tradition of some air force squadron. And all play on the course is supposed to stop for a minute of silence at 13:00 and a playing of taps, enforce by the golf carts shutting off. I thought that was a lovely idea…except that it didn’t happen.


Ok, that’s enough about the covid golf economy and the place itself. How about the golf course? It’s a new Jack Nicklaus design on the site of the old Grand Haven Golf Club. Grand Haven was supposed to be one of the better public courses in southwestern Michigan, but I never got a chance to play it. The new course follows mostly the same routing but is apparently very different in character. The old course was tree-lined and narrow. The new one is expansive and in the spirit of a lot of the destination courses built in the last 20 years, takes advantage of the sandy site, with extensive sandy waste areas. It was an excellent choice; the course looks good.

And the design elements? Also very good. This was a very ambitious project and they were clearly aiming to be one of the top public courses in Michigan. They have succeeded. There some drawbacks, most notably in the routing which has three ~125 yard walks between tees. But I thought that the design of the holes and the shaping throughout, including on and around the greens was excellent. It’s a bit more subdued than some of the other ‘New Nicklaus’ courses like nearby Harbor Shores (apparently; I haven't played it) or Old Corkscrew in Florida. But I think that that’s good. There’s plenty enough green-to-tee challenge. There’s no need for additional severity at the greens—although there are a few tricky ones.


Actually there’s one bad walk that I forgot about—to the first tee, which is probably ~300 yards. I think that I was the only person on the (full) course who was walking that day, so I just hopped on the back of Bob’s cart.

The first is a gentle handshake, a par 4 of about 350 yards. It’s not particularly generous off the tee, but you should probably only be hitting an iron anyway. The green is small and surrounded by mounds, which are there to hide the road that runs along the course. Don’t worry, you won’t see this kind of shaping around the green again.

Two is a somewhat awkward par 5 of about 500 yards from the ~6,700 yard ‘Valor’ tees, but one that I liked. It bends to the right around a pond but you actually want to go down the middle because if you hit it long enough to reach the green in two, an oak tree ~80 yards short of the green blocks a shot from the right side. It’s about 290 to the edge of the pond and if you hit it this far, you should be good.
​
If you’ve hit a short drive, the oak tree can cause trouble for the second. The limbs are high enough that you can go under and there’s plenty of room short and left. I liked the tree—it keeps you honest on the layup. The green slopes front-to-back, which I liked.

Three is a ~370 yard straightaway par 4 with a pond starting on the left at about 250. Definitely not my favorite hole but the small, subtle pushed-up green makes for a good challenge.

One of the clunky walks is up the hill to the short par 3 fourth. It’s probably ~100 yards on a direct line but that’s of course not what the cart path does. Like the 2nd at the Kingsley Club, I suspect that this hole is a bit polarizing. The green is deep but narrow, with deep bunkers at both sides. Over the green is death. But I didn’t mind this hole because if you miss the green a bit short, the pitch isn’t too hard. With new, very firm greens, you had to be careful but clearly the play here will be to hedge toward the front of the green.

I preferred this hole to Kingsley’s second because the bunkering is a bit less severe, but it’s also been awhile since I’ve been there.

There’s another walk back up the hill to the par 4 fifth but it’s worth it. Plus you can leave your bag next to the fourth green because you walk past it to get to the fairway.

This is probably the course’s signature hole and it’s one of the best par 4s in the state. It’s also pretty clear to see from the tee what’s going on; the green is online with the bunker that encroaches into the left side of the fairway. You can see that short and right of the green is a massive waste area hill…which means that if you bailout too far to the right, you’ll probably have a blind second shot. This is correct.

One more important feature is that even if you can’t carry the bunker on the left (maybe 240), there’s still a ledge in the fairway to its right that can feed the ball to the left where you’ll have a clearer approach. The green is big, undulating and again, slopes a bit back-to-front.

Six is a 520 yard par 5 that narrows at about the 250 mark. Everything is pretty much right in front of you here…just hit it straight. The green has a pretty good false front, so don’t be short. But it also slopes away to the back-left so don’t be too long if the pin is in the front. Tough green.

After another ~100 yard walk through a neighborhood we reach number seven, a fine ~170 yard par 3. The green is much wider on the right than the left and won’t be too difficult if the pin is right. It’s also probably best to hedge over here if the pin is left.

Eight is ~400 yards but you don’t want to go anymore than about 250 because of the pond. It’s better if you challenge the bunker and place your drive up the left side because then you’ll be able to play down the angle of the green. It’s much shallower across the pond if you’re coming in from the right.

Nine is a bit shorter than eight, doglegging right with a pond short and left of the green on the approach. There’s an obvious aiming point off the tee—the massive American flag, which is ~275 from the valor tees. But what you really want to do is either go over the edge of the trees on the right or hit a fade around them. There’s more room over there than you think and you won’t have to carry the pond from there.

The back nine starts with another ~400 yard par 4. It’s straightaway and the drive is fairly simple, but it’s best to be up the left side of the fairway because the green angles front-left to back-right and narrows.

While to this point, American Dunes has been a very good course with a few standout holes, it becomes an excellent one through the middle of the back nine. This starts with number eleven, a terrific short par 4. The drive is uphill into a saddle and if you can get your drive within about 100 yards of the green, you’ll pick a few dozen more yards from a downslope. The left side of the fairway collects balls but the further left you go, the less room you have before the end of the fairway.

The green is large, but very undulating and you don’t want to be long.

Twelve is another beautiful par 3, a bit of a reverse redan where you can use short grass short and left of the green to run the ball on. It’s an especially good idea to use this slope to get at back right pins.

In addition to being fine holes in their own right, the routing of this part of the course is particularly good, with just a few dozen feet of walking between each green and tee.

At 680 yards from the tips, thirteen is about the longest par 5 that I’ve ever seen. The valor tees are still ~600 yards and there’s a lot of trouble on the way. The fairway starts huge, but there’s long grass and broken ground in the middle of the fairway ~260 out from the valor tees. This makes it a pretty tough driving hole.

The second is also tough because it narrows between bunkers and you need to get within about 125 yards to have a decent view of the green. Fortunately if you don’t get your first two shots far enough to have a clear view, it’s pretty easy to feed your ball onto the green from short and right because it has pretty good front-right to back-left slope. An excellent long par 5.

Another medium-short par 4 (~365 yards), fourteen is the toughest driving hole on the course. Fairway bunkers are staggered with those on the right at 200 and 220, the one on the left at about 250, and the waste bunker through the fairway ~280. It’s important to hit it at least 240 to get it up to the flat, which improves the visibility on the approach.

It’s a very tricky green, with a spine running horizontally across and the back of the green sloping away. As with several of the greens here, you need to have good control over your approaches because it’s easy to run through the back on these fall-away greens.

There are no visibility issues on the 200 yard downhill par 3 fifteenth. But there is a wildly undulating, biarritzesque green that’s about 65 yards deep. Another very good hole in a very strong stretch.

Perhaps the best hole of all in this superb back nine stretch is the long par 4 sixteenth, which would certainly make my list of the best par 4s in the state. The fairway is generous, but the drive is uphill and you’ll need to hit it about 270 from the valor tees to have a good view of the green.

The approach is one of the great ones that I’ve seen on a par 4. A waste bunker bisects the fairway and you’ll need to be able to carry your approach within 40 yards of the green to cross it. It also runs diagonally from short-left to long-right so a miss right will likely catch it. But you should hedge left here anyway because the fairway feeds balls toward the green.

The par 4 seventeenth looks more challenging off the tee than it is because there’s fairway over the bunker in front of the tee. But it does narrow on the left around 250 and you’ll want to hedge a bit right. I didn’t get a photo of the green but again, it slopes away at the back.

While the back nine is one of the best in Michigan, it closes with the weakest, least original hole on the course: a straightaway 500 yard par 5 through trees with a pond running up the right side of the green. Maybe they could remove some of the trees and rough up the ground on the right to make it a bit more visually appealing.

My first thought after my two rounds at American Dunes was that it’s probably the best public course in the state. That may have been a bit generous, but it's a defensible claim. More than half of the holes, 4-6 and 11-17 are excellent and a few of those are certainly among the state’s best. There are also some good holes among the rest, especially 2 and 7. There are a few too many water holes and eighteen is very weak, but hole-for-hole, it stacks up well. There a few ~120 yard green-to-tee walks, but most of the routing is tight. It compares favorably to all but the tightest routings (Belvedere, Forest Dunes, the Loop).

I also thought that the course had and outstanding set of green complexes. The New Nicklaus courses tend to be overdone on and around the greens; too small with too many severe edges and often severe internal contours. But none of those is true here. The shaping always works with the natural contours, which creates great variety in the green complexes. There’s a lot of short grass around these greens, but not many severe run-offs. The detailing work here is excellent. There’s a lot of interior contour, but it’s never excessive. I especially appreciated that several of the greens fall away to the back, fitting their sites. We’ve come a long way from the 90s when no matter how severe the downslope, the green would be built up to slope back-to-front…with mounds behind it.

So American Dunes might be the best public course in the state. Every one of them has its weaknesses. So does American Dunes, but I feel that even these are lesser than Arcadia Bluffs (unwalkable), Greywalls (a few horrible greens), the Loop (again, overdone greens), and Arcadia Bluffs South (feels like it was designed by a computer). Forest Dunes is probably the other least-weak public course in the state, but it has the awful tenth hole. And there are as many good holes here as on any of those. It doesn’t compare to Wisconsin’s best public courses but as I like to say, the best public course in Michigan would only be the fifth or sixth best there. It’ll probably be just as hard to get a good tee time in 2022 and they’ve jacked up the rates (from $150 to $185), but it’s definitely worth it to play American Dunes.

Although it has been the premier public course in the midwest for the last 20 years, I’d never really had a burning desire to play the Straits Course at Whistling Straits. The main reason was that it was incredibly expensive. But I also got to see it plenty of times on TV and between that and playing Arcadia Bluffs—Michigan’s equivalent—several times over the years, I almost felt like I had already seen it. These are some of the same reasons why Pebble Beach isn’t too high on my list.

But one thing that I’ve come to believe, maybe as a result of now being an independent adult and having the money to do it, is that for something you really want, or maybe even just something that you feel that you should do for completion’s sake, you should spend the money. I’ve become much happier to spend a good amount of money to play a course that I really want to play because it creates a lot of memories. I’m good about remembering details of courses, plus I take comprehensive pictures. So I get a lot that’s lasting out of it. And if you think about it, $350 for a round of golf is only ~$80 and hour, the price of a golf lesson. I’ll remember much more of this.

And actually, Whistling Straits was something of a deal in $/hr…because it took 5 1/2 hours to play. Our group was something of a small army on the first tee; four players, two wives, and two caddies. It was only my second time taking a caddie and…my second time learning why I never take a caddie. They double bag here and if the guy playing from the other bag is terrible, you’re gonna feel by the end of the round that the caddie should tip you for all the running back-and-forth that you’ll have to do. And for some reason, despite the fact that they’re shooting 125, people seem to treat every shot here like they’re a pro, trying to get distances to every one of the 1000+ bunkers, reading each putt from 7 angles. There was no one in front of us, we had six hours of sunlight, yet we barely made it. It was excruciating.

But back to the course itself. As mentioned, I felt pretty familiar with it having seen it so many times on TV. But there were a few surprises, some good, some bad. The first concern I had was that all of them being next to the water, the par 3s would feel too similar. That wasn’t an issue because they vary in elevation change and distance. The other was that the figure-8 routing would create paired holes that felt too similar to each other. Also not really an issue. 8/13 have a somewhat similar feel but 8 is much longer, so they didn’t feel too similar. Actually the par 5s 2/16 felt the most similar, but they aren’t in the same place in the routing.

The one thing that’s really an issue here is how narrow the fairways have become. They narrowed them for the PGA many years ago and I’m pretty sure they’re not extending them back. Some of the corridors of the holes along the coast also felt a bit too narrow and left me feeling that these holes might be impossible in a good wind. Finally, there’s one truly awful hole, no. 5, and a few greens that are completely overdone.

I mentioned that part of the reason that I didn’t have a burning desire to play here was that I had played Michigan’s equivalent, Arcadia Bluffs several times. How do they stack up? Actually, Arcadia Bluffs stacks up pretty well. It’s far less walkable, which is a real weakness, and it doesn’t have as many really good holes. But there’s more variety in the shaping of the holes at Arcadia Bluffs. I also preferred the greens there, which are heavily contoured but aren’t in so many awkward shapes. Arcadia only has a few cliffside holes but many of the inland holes are quite good. It’s a clear win for Whistling Straits, but the difference between them is not as big as the lists suggest…and closer to what I suspected.


Although it was some three weeks after the Ryder Cup, a lot of the stands were still up, including the one walking to the first tee. Walking through that was pretty cool.

The opening tees were up about 40 yards making this a short par 4 of ~360. Bryson may be able to drive the green but the rest of us should be focused on the bunker complex that narrows the fairway on the right at about 230. I went with driver in my first round and skirted the edge, leaving a wedge down the angle of the green. In my second round, I laid back and had an 8-iron. Unless you can get past the bunker, the green is very shallow, too shallow even for an 8-iron. I’d need a few more rounds to say for sure, but I think it’s best to take on the risk from the tee here.

The second is a par 5 of about 520 from the regular back tees. This was one of several holes where the fairway felt a bit awkwardly narrow. You need to carry about 260 here to clear the narrow area, which has bunkers and bushes on both sides.

The fairway jogs right in the layup area about 100 yards short of the green and you’ll need to decide whether you’re laying up, which leaves a partially obstructed view into the green or going for the sliver of fairway short of the green. If going for the green, there’s a nasty bunker about 20 yards short that you’ll have to avoid. The green is a beauty, both in view and contours.

Three is the course’s medium-length par 3 and it’s a good one. It plays a good one club down hill although you need to make sure that you carry it into the green because there’s a false front.

The long par 4 fourth also seemed awkwardly narrow, especially from the tee because you can’t see much of the fairway. Aim just inside the bunkers on the hill on the right, which are ~250 out. Long hitters need to aim a bit further left and the rest of us will ideally hit a draw because if you can get it past this, the fairway runs down hill to the left, cutting about 30 yards off the approach. The approach is a great one, with plenty of room to run the ball in from the right and a good chance of a favorable kick. Great hole.

The fifth is not a great hole. In fact, it’s one of the worst holes that I’ve ever played. I’m sure that everyone now tries to carry the pond like Bryson did. You can’t do it and shouldn’t try.

But you do need a long ball and should try to hug the pond because unless you get to the end of the fairway, the landing area for the second is completely blind. This second shot is probably one of the ten or so worst shots I’ve seen on a golf course. The fairway angles to the right and the whole thing is carry over bunkers, but it’s hard to tell how far you need to hit it and where the fairway on the right ends. The pond angles in on the left, but it’s hard to tell where that is too. I was amazed to see pros laying up into the water during the Ryder Cup but having played the hole now, I’m not surprised.

To me, a simple fix would be to remove the mounds around the bunkering on the right so that you could see the fairway. It would still be an awkward hole that stylistically has no place on this course, but it wouldn’t be such a disaster. Apparently they’re going to completely redo it though, which is probably even better.


The ~360 yard par 4 sixth also created a lot of drama in the Ryder Cup, with many pros trying to drive the green. But this was another hole that I didn’t like. The main problem is the hourglass-shaped green. If the pin is on the right, it’s simply too small for anyone but the pros to hit with anything more than a sand wedge. There’s no bailout area where you can be pretty sure that you won’t go back-and-forth across the green. And unless you drive it 250+ or way left (in the rough), you can’t really see this part of the green. So it’s a short par 4 that demands a long drive and has nowhere to play safe if you don’t pull that off.

I think that I would like the hole much more with the pin on the left (both times I played it was on the right), which makes it much easier. But I don’t see the problem with that as we just played two very hard holes and have several more to come.

Down on the water’s edge, the par 3 seventh requires a much longer iron and looks intimidating, but I found it much easier. There’s fairway short and left but the big help here is that you can hit a pretty good pull and the ball will still kick off the mounds onto the green.

Eight is a stunning long par 4. If you hit the ball in the 260 range like I do, it’s actually best to got to the 450 yard standard back tees (~7,100 yards) because you can run out of fairway on the right from the 415 yard green tees (~6,450 yards). There is room to the left if you carry some of the bunkers up the left side of the fairway. The green is large and there’s room to run it on, but you’ll need to be pretty accurate.

Playing into a funnel-shaped fairway, the par 4 ninth is one of the least-intimidating driving holes. But the approach makes up for it. Like six when the pin is on the right, you need a long drive here because the green is small.

Ten is another shortish par 4 where they moved the tees up in the Ryder Cup to make it drivable. It’s a tough hole from the standard back tees unless you can make the 240 carry to the ridge in the fairway. If you can, the fairway is quite wide. Like one, the green is narrow but deep.

Eleven is an excellent par 5, but a bit awkward. This is another hole where the drive is easier from the standard back tees if you hit it in the 250-260 range because that’s where the fairway narrows from the green tees.

The approach is very interesting. You’d have to be able to carry about 520 yards in two shots to go for the green but there are still a few choices with the layup. The fairway dips but then rises again about 100 yards from the green. Like on two, you’ll have to decide if you want to try to carry it up there to have a good view of the green, or have a partial view and longer shot from the valley. The green slopes pretty good from left-to-right so unless the pin is back-right, it’s best to layup up the right side.

Twelve is the short par 3 and for us it was very short—~100 yards. The main part of the green is large and undulating and you’ll need to be pretty close to the pin to avoid having a difficult putt.

But then there’s also that little ‘tongue’ in the back-right. When they put the pin there, even the pros were hitting it in the bushes. You also can’t putt to that section from the rest of the green. So it’s an awful hole if the pin is there. Otherwise it’s a good one, especially if they put the pin in the back-right of the main portion of the green, behind the bunker. That’s a proper (i.e. not absurd) tough pin.

Thirteen is a shorter and easier version of eight. It’s one of the few fairways that actually looks inviting from the tee. And the downhill second, to a green which looks like it’s floating on the lake, is one of the best-looking shots that I’ve ever seen. Just an incredible work of landscape architecture, especially when you consider that it was a flat, featureless site.

Fourteen is another short par 4 that gets almost no attention. But it’s a good hole. There’s a trade-off here; the further you go, the more likely you are to have a view of the green. But the green also angles front-left to back-right, so the angle becomes a bit more awkward. I think that trade-off is worth making.

Or you can do like I did and drive it in the left fairway bunker.

Fifteen is another excellent long par 4 but again, you run out of room on the left if you’re playing the green tees. But there’s another option: carry ~240 over the right fairway bunker. The hole works best if you’re playing it from a yardage where this carry is possible, but only if you hit a really good drive. This hole was just killing the pros in the Ryder Cup because it was into the wind and they couldn’t make this carry. So they were all missing way left into the stands.

The drive on sixteen is like that on number four, but less intimidating; it’s one of the widest fairways on the course. But the approach is a more intimidating version of that on number two because you can’t see the layup fairway very well. Still, there’s plenty of room up there and it’s very playable.

On a course with many contenders, seventeen is probably the signature hole. Even the non-playing wives in our group wanted in on the actions, putting down their phones for a few minutes and taking a shot and the green.

Even setting the views aside, it’s a great hole. There’s obviously a high intimidating factor with the wall on the left side of the green, Lake Michigan beyond, and the volcano bunker cutting into the green on the other side. But there’s more effective room to play to than you can see; if you can carry the bunker, the ball will kick left into the middle of the green. Hell, even if you miss the bunker right the ball will probably kick back onto the green.

Eighteen has always been a contentious hole because of its huge, goofy green. The green has gotten less goofy over the years. It used to be cross-shaped but they removed the lobe at the top of the cross so now it’s just T-shaped with the base of the T at the front-right.

But the drive is also contentious here. The fairway runs out at about 300 yards from the standard back tees although both days we were up a block and it was only about 265 to the end of the fairway. The problem with this is that the closest that you can realistically get to the green is about 180 yards. Now the right side of the green is reasonably receptive to a shot of such length and there is bailout room short left. You could also try to hit a draw to get your drive to catch the downslope in the left side of the fairway, which would cut off about 20 yards.

Overall, I liked the hole more than I thought I would. In principle, I dislike long par 4s that force you to have a long approach but it’s possible—if not likely—to shorten the approach with a perfect drive and while exacting, there’s room to play safe on the approach. Maybe making a 50 ft. birdie putt in my first round softened my view…

I’m glad that I finally played the Straits Course. It’s an excellent golf course with several great holes. It’s also just a thrilling property to walk around with some of most stunning vistas probably in the entire world of golf. I joked to one of my playing partners’ wives that in just walking the course, they were getting all of the benefits without any of the drawbacks of having to play.

If you’re a serious golfer and trying to shoot a score, there are definitely some drawbacks. The fifth hole is awful and frustrating. So is the sixth if they put the pin on the right. But there’s a lot of flexibility in the course and I get the sense that they try to maintain balance in the setup. Both days that I played, the pin was right on six but on the fat left part of the green on twelve. Several of the tees were up although as I mentioned, that creates another problem in that you can run out of fairway on several holes.

So overall it’s an excellent course, clearly the best that I played in 2021. But I don’t like it so much more than its counterpart Arcadia Bluffs on the other coast of Lake Michigan. I feel that Arcadia has a bit more variety in its holes. The bunker schemes differ more from hole-to-hole. Some holes are wide, some narrow. The greens are big and undulating, but in differing ways. Pete Dye’s courses are always very strategic but the scheme with the angles—hug this waste bunker/pond for the better angle—is repetitive. And it’s not my favorite of Wisconsin’s superior collection of public courses—I’d have both Sand Valley and Lawsonia’s Links Course ahead of it.

I guess my issues boil down to this: the course feels a bit over-designed. And I don’t even mean that in the sense that there’s too much visual clutter with the bunkers and mounds. There is, but even setting that aside, there are too many odd green shapes that make sense in theory but don’t work unless you’re about a +1 or better. Fairways seem to narrow in the theoretically right spot on every hole (250 from the green tees, 100 yards from the green on a par 5). The logic on every hole is very clear in plan and I guess it would be nice if once in awhile, that weren’t the case. I feel a bit the same way about the much-lauded Arcadia Bluffs South Course--everything feels a bit too calculated. I guess that when everything is the result of the hand of man, it’s tough not to make everything seem like it’s the hand of man.

But I can’t deny that the hand of man created several great holes and some impressive works of landscape architecture here. It can’t be the easiest thing to get the shaping just right to make the green seem like it’s floating above Lake Michigan, like on the thirteenth hole. And seventeen is every bit the marvel that it seems on TV, plus a hole with interesting, if not obvious options to boot. All this drama made it a perfect course for the Ryder Cup and one that every serious golfer should go play.

Like many golfers, I was watching the Ryder Cup at Whistling Straits and thinking to myself ‘this course looks amazing.’ But unlike many golfers, I’m from a state that borders Wisconsin, have played many of Wisconsin’s best courses, but have never played Whistling Straits. So I was also saying to myself, ‘why haven’t I played there yet?’ I knew that I’d have to be in Michigan (I live in DC) during the middle of October so the day after the Ryder Cup, I thought—being skeptical of success—that I’d give them a call and see if I could get some tee times. I called the day after and to my surprise (1) I was able to get through and (2) I was able to get some tee times. So I was off to play a course that I probably should have played several years ago.

But as I think most golfers know, there are two courses at Whistling Straits, the Ryder-Cup-hosting Straits Course which occupies all of the best land along the shoreline and the inland Irish Course. The plan here was clearly to have one standout course and one ‘other’ course, but the Irish has been shaped in much the same spirit as the Straits and lake views aside, there’s often a similar look and feel. Both courses are heavily shaped to give them (I guess; I haven’t been) an ‘Irish dunes’ feel although perhaps because it was built on a flat piece of farmland and all that dirt had to come from somewhere, there’s more water on the Irish course. It feels more like a standard Pete Dye course than the Straits.

Now that I’ve played somewhere around a dozen Pete Dye courses, I’m starting to realize that there was a spectrum in his design style as far as shaping from subdued, like Radrick Farms in Michigan or much of the Meadow Valleys next door at Blackwolf Run, to extreme. At this end we find courses like the Dye Course at the Barefoot Resort in Myrtle Beach and Whistling Straits. While all of his course generate a lot of strategy in the placement of hazards, courses in the latter category have a lot of shaping between the holes, creating this faux dunes look.

I definitely prefer the courses in the former category. While the Irish has a lot of good holes and I appreciate that they were trying to create a consistent style across the two Whistling Straits courses and different from the two courses at Blackwolf Run, but the Irish just feels overdone too me. There’s plenty of width out there (certainly more than on the Straits), but there’s also a lot of awkwardness, with it being unclear where to hit several shots. And there’s just a lot more created severity than necessary. I’ve never played a Pete Dye course that suffered from being too easy, but several that suffered from the opposite.

Now I had to play the Irish Course because I hadn’t played it and needed to check the box. But it was probably my least favorite of the four Kohler courses and save for a heavy discount, I probably wouldn’t play it again.


The first hole is a mid-length par 4 running gradually up a hill to a green that’s on a diagonal from front-right to back-left. Although it had been three weeks, there was still Ryder Cup infrastructure on the course and we were limited to the 275 yard forward tee, making this an interesting driveable par 4. I’d like the original version more as an opening hole, but this version works and I would imagine plays similarly for someone who drives the ball 160 yards as the full version does for the rest of us.

Two is a very Pete Dye short par 4 with water up the left side and a shallow green that angles from front-left to back-right. Dye is always good a generating strategy—lay up on the dangerous left side for the best angle—but when you play a lot of his courses, you realize that it’s usually the same idea, just with somewhat different features…but usually a pond.

Three is a another Dye water par 3 although I like the steep-faced bunker in front of the green. You find this kind of shaping on the Blackwolf Run courses and a lot of it over there reminds me of Langford.

Four is the standard S-shaped long par 4, going around a big bunker on the left with the drive, then one on the right with the approach. Interesting, but standard stuff for Dye. The one thing that I like about this hole is that the fairway really narrows in the driving zone, so the optimal drive is not just a matter of taking on the risk of skirting the bunker, but also staying within the narrowing margin on the right.

The par 5 fifth hole reminds me of the notorious fifth hole next door. This is not a good thing. We have a similar drive skirting a feature that cuts into the fairway on the right, but at least this time it’s a bunker, not a pond. You need to be fairly close to the bunker because if you’re not, it’s difficult to carry the junk that cuts off the fairway ~90-140 yards from the middle of the green. Again, there’s certainly strategy here although it’s a tough carry to a narrow landing area for most and if you can’t carry, the layup area narrows and is kind-of blind.

I like the look of the short par 3 sixth but I guess, running out of ideas, Dye just decided to surround this narrow green with sand. Still, a good short par 3.

Seven is also a good short par 4 where a drive up the right side short of the bunker (~240) will leave you a look down the angle of the green. This is one hole where the heavy shaping around the fairways bothered me because it didn’t blend well with the forest setting.

Apparently I forgot to get a picture of the drive on the par 5 eighth, but it’s fairly narrow and awkward, with waste bunkers up the right. We have another awkward carry to a narrow layup area here. This one shouldn’t be too difficult for good players if they’ve hit a decent drive but is killer for high handicaps because again, there isn’t a lot of room on either side.

The ~390 yard ninth is a bit better because while it’s an interesting hole in its own right, it’s also a bit different for this course because the shaping is much more subdued. A winding creek bisects a very wide double fairway. The right side shouldn’t be a difficult carry if you’re playing the correct tees but the carrying left side demands a good hit. While there’s ample fairway to the right, the further right you go, the worse your angle into the narrow green and the more likely it is that you’ll be blocked by trees. Not too hard a hole, but interesting.

The tenth hole is next to and reminds me of the tenth next door; an uphill short par 4 that bends slightly to the left. Like that green and many here, this one is narrow but deep.

I thought that the par 3 eleventh was the most aesthetically effective heavily-shaped hole on the course. It's the one hole where the fake dunes start to look realistic. The hole is very similar in principle to the seventh next door, with a hazard on the right (this time a bunker rather than Lake Michigan) and a hill left that you can use to kick your ball onto the green. This hole would fit in very well next door.

Twelve is a not-particularly-interesting mid-length par 4 notable to me for one thing: the bold shaping at the front-left of the green reminds me of something that you’d see on a Langford course.

The par 3 thirteenth is a mess. The hole is in the wetlands, yet Dye decided to build some of the biggest mounds on the property and a wild ~15,000 sq. ft. green that you can only see about half of from the tee. Apparently there’s also an upper set of tees from where the hole is downhill, yet blind. Definitely a ? hole.

We’re back to more normal golf on the par 5 fourteenth, where the shaping is much more subdued and looks good. It’s another Dye template on the approach, this time the carry-a-diagonal-creek-to-a-high-landing-area-on-the-left-and-a-left-to-right-angled-green template. There’s a very similar hole at Bulle Rock in Maryland but this one works a bit better because the land is flatter.

The long par 4 fifteenth is another Dye template, with diagonal junk up the right and a hill up the left. It’s a good driving hole and you’ll need a good one here to have a decent length approach into the deep, narrow green that angles from front-left to back-right. Listen to your forecaddie and aim a little left and take one club less because the back bunkers aren’t great (as I learned).

Sixteen is another tough, long par 4, this time not any Dye template that I’m aware of. The drive is uphill and a bit narrow between a bunker (and hidden pond) left and a hill of sheit on the right. The look into the green is nice, with minimal intrusive shaping. Again, the green is narrow and deep, but this time there’s ample room to run the ball in.

Seventeen is a Dye pond short par 4 that was especially tough into a ~15 mph. wind on this day. There’s some nice shaping on and in front of the green but otherwise, the hole is pretty tedious.

While we drive over a pond on the par 5 eighteenth, it shouldn’t be too difficult to carry from the correct set of tees. The bigger issue here is keeping your drive up the left so that you have a clearer view over another creek to the green.

The approach here might be the best-looking shot on the course. The green is built-up and has another Langford-looking edge on the left side. While again there’s a creek crossing in the layup area, there’s ample room on both sides. This hole reminded me more of Blackwolf Run than the rest of the Irish course and it was easily my favorite par 5.

Dye courses are difficult to rate because most seem to employ the same strategy-generating elements. Because of the similarity, I think that the order in which you see them matters for personal preference. Arguably it should also matter for how you rate them; originality is important and a piece of work in which you do something great for the first time deserves more acclaim than another in which you do that same thing for the 20th time.

If I had never played a Dye course before, I probably would have liked the Irish a lot more because it’s very interesting in its own right. But after 6 or 8 courses like this, you start to think ‘yeah, it’s an interesting design style and generates strategy, but couldn’t you do something a bit different once in awhile?’ I don’t often get the feel that I’m seeing something new on these courses and when I do, it’s in a bad way—like the godawful 5th hole next door on the Straits course. It makes me wonder if I’d be unimpressed by TPC Sawgrass because I would have seen a lot of it elsewhere—even though it was the first for many of those templates.

Still, the Irish is a good course. There are several good holes and I thought that there were a few times that the manufactured landscape looked quite good, like on the par 3 eleventh.

But I’ll also reiterate another criticism: the fake dunes shaping doesn’t work well with the forest setting that we encounter several times here. There’s an interesting trade-off between shaping in a consistent way across a course and shaping in a way that fits the setting that you have, which may differ across the course. Dye is much closer to the former here, but I would have preferred the latter. I don’t think that there’d be anything wrong with having holes with fake dunes like 1 and 11 (which are also next to the Straits, where this shaping looks better) when there wasn’t much to work with and then transitioning to the more Langford-style shaping of the River Course or even something more minimal when you have a nice forest setting like 7, 13-14. You get a bit of a different style on 9 and 18, but I would have liked to have seen more of this. There’s something to be said for internal consistency, but different styles can work if you’re careful about the flow between them (Park Jr./Colt blend brilliantly on Sunningdale’s Old Course).

One more point: being the clearly inferior course at Whistling Straits, you’d think that you’d want to use the Irish as a warm-up course. But it’s way too hard for that; I wouldn’t say that it’s much easier than the Straits, only maybe a little bit because the fairways are wider. I’d go the other way with the Irish—play the Straits in the morning and use the Irish as your beer-drinking, golf-ball-losing afternoon round.

Come to think of it, Kohler could really use an easier warm-up course. The first six holes on the Meadow Valleys are perfect for this, but the rest of the course isn’t. Like I said earlier, Pete Dye courses have never suffered for being too easy and it would have been nice if someone else had designed one of these courses. Kohler wants to build a fifth course in a forested state park just south of Sheboygan but while the plans are currently on hold, apparently Dye was slated to build that one too. But now that Dye is gone, hopefully if they build that course—which I’m not sure that they should; it’ll mean tearing up a lot of old forest that’s in short supply in southeastern Wisconsin—they’ll get someone else to do it.

15 years after my first visit in summer 2006, I was finally able to return to Belvedere on my way back from the upper peninsula. While this semi-private course had a reputation back then as a hidden gem, it’s become less hidden since then, appearing recently on many lists of Michigan’s best courses and even Golf Digest’s top 100 courses you can play. I was a big fan of Belvedere when I played it back then. I felt that the back nine had a few outstanding goals. Especially notable were the green complexes, several of which I felt were among the better ones that I’d seen.

But I’d also been hearing that it had gotten a lot better since then because the club had done a lot of work on the greens. So the course moved right up to the top of my list of ‘courses that I most need to see again in Michigan’ list.

While it’s fundamentally the same course that I saw in 2006, many of the fairway mowing lines around bunkers and greens had been expanded and most notably, many of the greens look to have been expanded. I couldn’t remember what all of these greens looked like before, but I’m almost certain that greens like eight and thirteen had been expanded because I don’t remember greens having what has become the most interesting feature at Belvedere: the mounds within the edges of several of the greens. Some of the greens, like the first, had short grass around them before but there was also a lot more of this than I can remember, although I couldn’t always tell you where.

So the verdict: it’s a very good course with one of the better sets of green complexes in the state. I agree with it’s recent placements at the low end of Golf Digest’s top 25 courses in the state and I’m fine with its placement near the bottom of the top 100 public courses list too, especially because there’s a lack of classic courses on that list.

But I’d also push back against those who’d put it in the state’s top 10 or very high on a list of top public courses. Much of the front nine is on uninteresting terrain and most of these holes lack tee-to-green interest. And although I really like the greens, I wouldn’t say that they’re one of the best sets that I’ve see because too much of the contouring is at the edges and doesn’t come into middle of the putting surfaces. The greens are large and most of the pinable areas are fairly flat.

Still, it’s a very good course and certainly one of the ones most worth visiting in northern Michigan. That’s in part because it’s so different from every other noteworthy public course in northern Michigan; classic in style, easily walkable, and without any severe/silly holes. It’s a perfect complement to an itinerary filled with places like Shanty Creek or Boyne Highlands.


One hole that I don’t think has changed much is the par 4 first: it’s still a beautiful downhill drive and an approach to a green with interesting run-offs on the left side and back. These were mowed as short grass in 2006 although there may not have been as much short grass coming into the green. It’s an excellent green complex and gets the course off to a fine start.

I think that most would agree that the weakness of Belvedere is the stretch of holes 2-5, excluding the long par 3 fourth. These play through flat, marshy terrain. But two and three are both still difficult par 4s because they’re fairly long (~430 apiece) and the greens are well-defended by bunkers. You also need to beware of marshy area right of the second fairway and the stream left of the third.

The long par 3 fourth is not a weakness however. On my last visit, I thought that this was the best hole on the front nine and one of the three or four best on the course. I’m not sure that I still hold either of those beliefs, but more because of other holes having gotten better or just being better than I realized.

As it should be, there’s ample room to run the ball onto the green here. The green edges are outstanding although these short grass areas were much soften than I would have liked. It had rained pretty good the night before but I think that there might be a bit too much bent grass in them and they might be a bit long to work well in any except the driest conditions.

I thought that the par 5 fifth was the least interesting hole on the course before and I think that I still agree with that (two is close). But it’s a pretty good driving hole, with a bunker on the right cutting into the fairway at about 250, penalizing those who hedge away from the out-of-bounds on the left.

I also remember not thinking much of the medium-length par 4 sixth but this is one hole where my assessment improved a bit on the second visit. It’s a more interesting driving hole than I remembered. There’s about a 200 yard carry over the right fairway bunker but this is also one of those cases where trees help make a shot interesting; you either need to carry the tree next to the bunker or fade one around it to get to the optimal spot in the fairway.

The approach is uphill to a very good large, heavily back-to-front sloping green.

I had remembered the long par 4 seventh one of the other best holes on the front nine but I think that I was a bit less impressed the second time around. The fairway is very wide and there are bunkers up the right but unless you drive it >300, they’re not reachable. And they’re a bit of a red herring anyway because you’ll have a better chance to see the green from the left side of the fairway.

All the short grass around the green is very nice and just what you should have on such a long par 4. I’m pretty sure that the fairway width was much smaller here before. Again the green is large although the contours are fairly modest.

The uphill short par 3 eighth has seen the most notable improvements. I remember this being a nice, but standard par 3 before, with a roundish green and trees behind. Now the green is massive with very interesting contours at its edges. It’s gone from being a nice par 3 to a very good one.

Although I’m not sure that there have been many changes, the short par 5 ninth is a better hole than I remembered because the drive, which I thought was good, is actually outstanding. It’s certainly the best driving hole on the course.

The obvious features here are the three bunkers in the corner of the dogleg right. It’s about 260 to carry all of them and if you do this, it’ll just be a mid-short iron to the green. But I didn’t realize last time how important another feature plays in this drive: the road on the left, which is out-of-bounds. While there’s ample room short of about 240, there’s only about 50 yards between the bunker that cuts into the fairway and the road. If you have distance but play away from the bunkers, it’d be easy to run out to the road, especially if conditions are firm.

The rest of the hole isn’t as interesting because the bunkering is generic and the green large and mostly flat, but this one of the best driving holes in the state and I think that that’s plenty enough.

While the front nine has its moments, the back nine is clearly stronger. The par 5 tenth is not a particularly demanding driving hole but if you’ve driven it far enough to get near the green, the second is. That’s because there are staggered bunkers leading into the green for about the last 100 yards. Again, the green is large and fairly modest.

Although the fairway on the ~400 yard eleventh is wide and the drive doesn’t look particularly interesting, it’s important to be up the left side to improve the visibility into what must be one of the best greens in the state. A big part of why I like the green so much is how well its contours blend in with their surroundings. The area around the green is some of the most rolling that we’ve encountered so far and the green appears to roll along with it, although I’m sure that there was some earth movement here.

The longer par 4 twelfth starts with an interesting, semi-blind drive. There are some visual cues here in the form of trees left and right. You can also tell that the land slopes off to the right of the fairway. This should clue you in that you want to keep your drive up the left.

The fairway on thirteen, another mid-length par 4, runs along the base of the hill that we played across on twelve. I remembered liking this hole before but I don’t remember the green as having been anything special. That has certainly changed—the green now has wild contours at its edges, which must have been obscured by rough before. This must be one of the best examples of the improvements that the club has made throughout the course.

I remember the green on the par 3 fourteenth as being in poor condition as the surrounding trees weren’t allowing it enough sun. But the trees have been cut back and the large green was in excellent condition this time.

Although long hitters would tear it up, the short par 5 fifteenth is a good hole for the rest of us. The primary feature here is the bunker on the right although even from the back tees, it’s only about a 220 carry. The fairway drops right down a steep hill past this and if it weren’t for the overhanging trees on the right, long hitters would easily be able to reach the lower level of the fairway.

I wasn’t a fan of this hole before and I’m still not. Some of the trees on the right should go, but that would also enable long hitters to cut the corner too easily. I think that the best approach would be to remove some of the trees and then build a tee 50 or 60 yards back. There’s plenty of room behind the fourteenth green and they’ve cleared a lot of trees there which makes me think that they’re thinking of doing this.

But I and everyone else are big fans of the sixteenth, which is a great short par 4. It’s the most rolling hole on the course and features a deep green benched into the side of a hill at a diagonal with a steep run-off on the right.

While the great green seemed the same as before, I don’t remember this being such an interesting hole off the tee. The staggered bunkers make for a very interesting drive and for the best angle in, you want to be close to the one on the left, which starts at about 240 from the tips. It’s a good green to try and drive if you’ve got the distance because misses right leave manageable seconds. Just don’t miss left.

The green complex has some of my favorite shaping anywhere. Like eleven, the rolls at the edges blend so nicely into their surroundings. It’s a bit severe if you miss right, but there’s still plenty of green surface to hit to, so it all works very well.

The par 3 seventeenth is the second of an excellent three-hole closing stretch. The green complex is a bit of a mirror image of the sixteenth, with the drop-off on the left. But it’s also quite large and there’s no reason to mess with the left side.

The fairway on the long par 4 eighteenth is generous, but there are bunkers up the right side to about 250 yards. It’s best to be on the right side of the fairway as the front-right of the green is open and it’s easiest to run the ball on the green on that side.

But while this is a good hole from tee-to-green, that part pales in comparison to the green, which is both the best on this course and one of the best that I’ve seen. Unlike most of the other interesting greens, the contours here are consistent through the green rather than just at the edges. That makes all pin placements interesting. I wish that a few more of the greens  here had contours like this throughout. Of course, I wish that all other courses did too ;-)

While Belvedere has long been considered a very nice classic course in Michigan, it’s only recently that it has come to be considered one of the best classic courses in Michigan. And I think justly so. The expansion of mowing lines on and around the greens and some of the fairway bunkers is excellent, creating many interesting shots around the greens and giving you the opportunity to use the slopes to feed your approach shots into them (or into the bunkers…). I think that the current presentation of the course is exemplary; if all Golden Age courses were presented like this, we’d have even more excellent ones than we already do.

I mentioned at the outset and in a few of my comments on the holes that the courses could be more of a test of driving and that the contours could be a bit more consistent throughout the greens. Really, there’s pretty good balance in the driving challenges. There are some holes with stern fairway bunkering and the holes with less trouble off the tee (2,3,7) are some of the longer par 4s. It’s certainly not one of the tougher tests of driving that I’ve seen but on reflection, I think that it’s challenging enough. That’s one of the things that I get out of writing these reviews; in going through all the pictures and looking at the pictures/thinking about the holes, my thoughts become more well-considered.

I stand by my comment that while the contour at the edges of the greens is excellent, it’s a bit of a disappointment that this outstanding contouring doesn't extend through the greens. This is especially an issue because the greens are quite large. You can have (and I did have) a lot of long, straight putts and that’s something that keeps the course from that next level. Still the greens are very good and occasionally (11,18) outstanding.

But in the grand scheme of things, this is a minor reservation and only has bearing on whether I think this is a great course, not whether it’s a very good one. It’s certainly that. It’s certainly one of the best public courses in the state. It’s certainly on a list of the top half dozen courses that you should see in northern Michigan.

And I feel especially strongly about the last point because it complements the others that you’ll see so well. Most of the other courses, including the best ones (save for maybe Crystal Downs) have a lot of severity, with wild terrain, very deep bunkers, severe drop-offs around greens, etc. This course has none of those. Plus it’s walkable. So even if you might not think it’s the best course on a trip that includes Arcadia Bluffs, Kingsley, etc., it’s an excellent complement. But also clearly worth seeing in its own right and worth a stop if you’re anywhere near Charlevoix.

Indianwood’s Old Course has been the site of many big championships, including a pair of US Women’s Opens and a US Senior Open. For many years, it was one of the most highly regarded courses in the state, both due to its championship pedigree and what is, for Michigan, a very unusual but outstanding piece of land: mostly treeless and hilly, with long grass between the holes, giving a look a bit like Shinnacock Hills or maybe Prairie Dunes. I don’t know if this was the case before the 80s marketing strategy of treeless courses as ‘links-like,’ but the club has also given itself a bit of a Scottish branding, with a bagpiper as a logo.

But the course has kind of fallen off the radar of top Michigan golf courses in the last 20 years, perhaps ignored as the hype has built around top new public courses like The Loop and Arcadia Bluffs South and the renovation of older courses like Franklin Hills and Meadowbrook. The most recent Senior Open was only in 2012, but I haven’t heard anything about this course being under consideration for further large tournaments.

And after seeing the first few holes, it’s easy to see to see some of the reason why this course hasn’t drawn the attention that it once did: the current presentation is very much in line with the ‘old’ school of thought on how to present a course for championships. The fairways have been narrowed to well inside their original margins between the bunkers. The greens have also shrunk. Like the clubhouse, the course is looking a bit weary for age and could use some of the freshening that so many classic courses—including many in the Detroit area—have received in recent years.

But even considering the suboptimal presentation, this is an excellent course. It must still be one of the top 15 courses in the state. Although aesthetically they have very little in common, it reminded me a lot of RTJ Sr.’s The Dunes in Myrtle Beach in that it’s just a consistently demanding test of golf. You must drive the ball straight because there are often bunkers on both sides of the fairway and you must hit high, relatively soft iron shots. This is a serious ball strikers course, to which the course rating of 74.6 from the <6,900 yard tips on a par of 70 (!) attests. Except the somewhat awkward ninth drive and the kind-of silly ~20,000 sq. ft. last green, the holes are very sound, if not often spectacular. I’ve come to appreciate courses like this more over the years, even if they don’t require a great deal of strategy. Plus, the Old Course is on one of the prettiest and most interesting pieces of land in the state.

So I think that the Old is still a real winner and deserves some of its attention back. While the greens are not among the more interesting sets that you’ll see, it has one of my favorite sets of bunkers ever, at least from a shaping perspective. There are a few too many of them, but the relatively flat-bottomed pits and their steep slopes are some of the best looking bunkers that I’ve seen. I think that they’re almost the perfect-looking set of bunkers for the site.


The first is one of only two par 5s on the Old Course and it sets the tone right away: a drive out into a field, but still narrow because of bunkers left and right. Like most holes here, you just need to hit the ball straight. The fairway drops into a valley about 100 yards short of the green and you’ll have a largely blind shot if you hit it there. Unless you can go for the green, it’s probably best to lay back.

The second is a very difficult ~390 yard par 4 with bunkers pinching the fairway at about 230. It’s not a bad idea to lay up here but you have to be careful—I tried to lay up and my 2-hybrid still ran into the right fairway bunker. The hole widens past this bunker and it might be better just to try an carry past it…although you really don’t want to miss right.

The terrain on the approach and the way that the green sits simply on the ground are both beautiful. This is one of several holes where the mowing lines on and around the green could be expanded, but it’s still a very good hole as is.

Three is a ~180 yard par 3 over a valley with a three-tiered back-to-front sloping green that sits at about a 60 degree angle from the main tees. From the back tee however, left of the second green, you play right down the angle of the green. It’s a good hole either way, but I think that it’s a bit more interesting with the angle from the regular ~165 yard tees.

The long par 4 fourth has been the source of some grumbling as it falls over a beautiful piece of land but where the fairway has clearly shrunk from its original margins. The narrowed mowing lines around the landing area don’t bother me as much as the shrunken mowing lines on and around this green, which I’d say is the one thing on the course that’s under-performing most relative to its potential.

It’s very difficult to get far enough off the tee to be able to see anything but the top of the flagstick on the approach. So everyone is dealing with a blind approach shot, but the approach is perfectly designed for this, with a broad fairway leading into a generous, back-to-front sloping green. Unfortunately both the approach fairway and the green itself have shrunk. This would be an incredible looking hole if they widened these sets of mowing lines and would make it easier to play the run-up shot that most will need to play from such a long distance off a sidehill lie.

The fifth is the second of four excellent par 3s. It features two very deep bunkers at its front-left and right. We’ll see after a few more holes that this green is something of a template on this course; sort-of a thumbprint in the front-middle with a higher second-tier around the back. Almost all of the greens tend to funnel from the sides and back into the middle and this lack of variety is a drawback.

Six and seven are two flat, straight par 4s. Six is about 465 yards and very difficult. The green opens from the right and so you’re best to be on that side of the fairway. The seventh green opens from the left and so you’re best approach from that side. And if you hook it all the way over into the sixth fairway like I did, that also isn’t too bad.

Eight is a bit of a bland uphill drive but it’s a very difficult second shot thanks to the small hilltop green. It’s really crucial that you hit a solid iron shot here.

I had been warned by a few people that the dogleg right short par 4 ninth was weird. It is. You drive over a valley to a diagonal ridge that runs off to the right toward the green. The first issue is that you need to carry it at least 200 yards to reach the top of the ridge. But you also need to keep it short of 240 or you can run through the fairway down a steep hill. Longer hitters will be tempted to hit driver across the corner and I’m not sure that that’s a bad idea given the lack of landing area in the lay up zone.

The approach is downhill to an absurdly back-to-front sloping green. Don’t be long and bank one off the clubhouse…like I did.

Ten is a fairly simple short par 4 where you just layup short of a pond at about 250 and pitch on to another steep back-to-front sloping green. Not the most interesting hole, but the shows off nicely the excellent shaping of the bunkers and the green complex.

The par 4 eleventh offers another choice of angles off the tee: a semi-blind drive over a bunker to a fairway that turns right but slopes left from the 400 yard back tees or straight up the chute from the ~360 yard middle tees. It’s a better choice than the third because this time, the back tees have the more difficult angle. The approach is similar to several others, uphill to a plateau green fronted by deep bunkers.

From the back tees, the 490 yard twelfth might be the hardest par 4 that I’ve ever seen. It’s a bit absurd because at 250 there’s a series of bunkers on the right and a pond at the edge of the fairway left. It’s one of the most difficult driving holes that I’ve ever seen. Even if you hit the fairway, the approach is to a green that’s completely fronted by bunkers, so leaving almost no way to run the ball on. It’s best to just lay up off the tee and play this as a par 5.

The par 3s are highlights on the Old Course and the 215 yard thirteenth might be my favorite of the bunch. It plays to what looks like a punchbowl green, but—unlike every other green on this course—it actually slopes out to the back left. That makes it pretty tough; unless you can hit something high that lands in the front, it’s hard to hold the green. It’s also hard to run one up here because of the slope short.

Thirteen is a pretty uninteresting long par 4 to another table top green. The holes on this part of the property (6-8, 14) are a weakness of the course although they’re still quite demanding and at least not gimmicky.

The rolling par 5 fifteenth is a bit more interesting. It shouldn’t be hard to carry the bunker on the right (although I didn’t…) and if you can get it to about the 280 mark from the tips, you can catch a downslope and run well downhill. The second shot is tough as the black locust tree on the right is getting too big and encroaching too much into the fairway. The green sits past it at the top of the hill.

The worst walk on the course is from the fifteenth green to the sixteenth tee; it’s about 175 yards. But it’s worth it because the long par 4 sixteenth is one of the course’s best and the beginning of an excellent three-hole closing stretch. The drive is through a chute uphill and you need about 240 yards to reach the plateau. The hole turns right around a cluster of fairway bunkers at about 275 and the approach is over beautiful, rolling land to a surprisingly small green. The best miss here is in the ample fairway short because the green is very narrow and the bunkers on both sides are, as usual, very deep.

I thought that the par 3 seventeenth was just beautiful. The green is sited at the far end of a ridge, so you really don’t want to go long or left. We have another variation on the thumbprint green, although this one is a bit different with the low area being at the front-right and the high area around to the left. Again, short is a good miss here.

I don’t know if it was like this originally or the club has altered it over the years, but the eighteenth is wild. Wild and very good, but with some flaws. In principle, this is a great driving hole, requiring about a 250 carry to reach the plateau up the left and where a long hitter can shorten the hole by a bit if the can carry it about that same distance over a mess of bunkers on the inside of the dogleg.
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But while it’s still a good drive, it’s too difficult at the moment because the fairway fills only about half its margin and it’s extremely narrow, making it difficult to run the ball up the hill. Mowing the fairway out on the left would help. I also think it would help if they lost one or two of the bunkers that cut into the fairway on the right to give a bit more width to try and skirt the rest of them. As is, the drive is very punishing for short hitters and I’d recommend moving up to a set of tees from where the carry to the top of the hill is manageable.

The approach over rolling hills to the massive green site is a beauty, but the green, probably the size of half of the rest of the greens put together, is absurd. Not in a bad way though—the contours on this monstrous green are some of the best that you’ll ever see. Although I wouldn’t want every green on the course to be this size (the greenskeeper certainly wouldn’t either), I wish that some of the other greens had this wonderful, free-flowing contouring. It’s hard to get the ball close to the pin here but it’s a lot of fun to putt when you fail.

I’d been wanting to play the Old Course for at least 20 years and it was nice to have the opportunity. I played Indianwood’s New Course back in 2002 and that was…interesting. I described it to someone as a course with multiple personality disorder; one hole it thinks it’s Pine Valley, then a resort course in northern Michigan, then Pete Dye, then St. Andrews. It takes landscape variety to the extreme. It’s an interesting course, but a bit of a mess. And as you’d expect given its late 80s origin, very hard.

The Old Course shares the difficulty of the New, but without any of the gimmickiness. Its personality is much more consistent; every hole is framed by beautiful long grasses and one of the best looking sets of bunkers in the state.

Yet I can’t help but think that while the Old’s personality is consistent, it’s still a bit lacking. As I mentioned at the outset, it’s a very stern test of golf. Low handicappers will appreciate this course. But while there are several very good holes (4,16,18, the par 3s), most of the rest seem a bit less interesting than they could be. The greens are definitely one issue; they’re too similar to each other, almost all sloping back-to-front and into the middle. I’m certain that a few of the greens have shrunk substantially and probably several more have as well. The lack of interest on the green surfaces is unfortunate because the green sites are outstanding, as is the shaping of the green complexes. Along with the bunkers, this is one of the best-looking sets of green complexes in the state.

The bunkers, while good-looking, are another issue. Their placement doesn’t generate much strategy. Most holes have bunkers lining both sides of the fairway and most greens have bunkers at both sides and at the front. So you’re trying to do pretty much the same thing with every drive and every approach shot—high and straight. It’d be nice if the bunker patterns changed from time-to-time, cutting into fairways at a diagonal to create carry hazards or an occasional one in the middle of a fairway.

So while the Old is a very good course as is, it could maybe benefit from bit of the freshening that southeastern Michigan’s other top country club courses have gotten recently. I don’t know if the original layout was better on some of these critical points that I’ve mentioned. If not, it may be worth doing a bit of redesign rather than restoration. But it might go a really long way just to change the mowing lines. In any case, the property is so good and there’s so much already going right here that it’d be nice if they could maximize the potential of what they have. As is it’s still one of the best courses in the state but I suspect that with the right treatment, it’d be a shoe-in for the top 5. There’s that much potential.

After a morning round at the excellent Keilir, we headed about 45 minutes north to the other side of Reykjavik to Brautarholt, a 12 hole course that’s gotten some attention for what in pictures look to be some pretty wild cliffside holes. I had seen a few more pictures of this course than of Keilir, so I had a bit more of expectations coming in. And they were high ones.

And they were largely met. This is a truly spectacular course. I wouldn’t describe it as a 12 hole course, though; I’d describe it as a nine hole course with three extra holes. Holes 1-9 are the spectacular ones, heading straight out along the cliffs and staying there most of the way. Holes 10-12 are on flatter inland and while they’re solid, they have none of the drama of the other nine and don’t really feel like part of the same course. It was just as well that as we headed out, a four ball was just in front of us and I asked if we could start with 10-12 and then loop around to play 1-9 to avoid running into them. This is the superior way to play all 12 holes here because then the course starts modestly and the drama builds. Playing it in order would result in a big letdown for the last three holes.


The one possible drawback to starting on 10 is that then the course starts with a par 3. This doesn’t bother me so much as probably 1/3 of my favorite courses in England started on a par 3. And this is an appropriately modest one, with little trouble in front of the green.

We were also greeted on the tenth tee by this curious robot. I wasn’t sure what it was at first until I started to see more of them. Then I realized…these robots are roomba lawnmowers and are the course’s primary grounds crew, mowing all of its fairways! They’re very cute and easy to turn off if they get in your way. Just don’t forget to turn them back on. And maybe give them a helping hand if the GPS has malfunctioned and they end up in a ditch, like one or two that we saw did.

The eleventh is a short par 4 with two of the course’s volcanic-ash-sand bunkers about 210 out in the middle of the fairway. It’s worth going for the green if you can carry these but into a wind with rental clubs, I wasn’t trying that. 

It’s about 240 to the bunker on the left on the ~350 yard twelfth. That’s the line you want to take…if you go too far to the right, one of the roombas might have to rescue you.

Crossing over the hill to the other side of the clubhouse, it becomes pretty clear that we’re in for something different for the next nine holes when we get to the ~480 yard par 5 first tee. This is just a spectacular-looking hole although a bit of a puzzle from the tee. With the ever-present wind, it looks to get quite tight between a pond on the left at about 240, junk on the right, and bunkers in the middle at about 260. I really don’t understand the point of the bunkers in the fairway here; it’d be a very tough drive without them.

The second shot is just spectacular…definitely one-ups anything we saw at Keilir in the morning (except maybe the drive over the bay and the fishing houses, but this is prettier). There doesn’t look to be and isn’t a lot of room in the lay up area, although there’s fairway over the first set of mounds on the left.

The green is just awesome; right on the cliff’s edge, large, and with outstanding contours. It’s a great hole anyway but lose all of the bunkers and it’s probably one of the world’s best. To use Tom Doak’s chess notation, it’d go from being a !? to a !!.

Other than the over-bunkering on the first hole, my only real issue with these nine holes was the long walk to the second. It’s probably about 350 yards up and around the cliffs. I suspect that they could have fit a rugged little par 3 somewhere in here.

The second hole is a short par 3 (~140) and reminded me how difficult a short par 3 is when the wind is blowing. There’s a small pond at the front-right of the green. Probably in any conditions, you just want to aim for the middle of the green, which is built-up in the back and receptive.

We only have about a 10 yard walk to the tee on three, a par 4 of about 320 yards. This is another spectacular hole but also a very interesting one. The angle of the green and visuals are much more open from the right side of the fairway but to get there, you have to challenge the cliff and the strip of rough/rocks that cuts into the fairway. It’s about 225 to the start of this and I’d suggest laying up short.

The walk is also very short to the fourth, another short, but very different par 4. This one appears quite wide open although it’s a bit unclear what exactly is out there. But you can swing away because the fairway gets even wider if you clear the crest at about 225.

The approach is to an unusual green that angles from short-right to long-left and is on this angle about 70 yards long (!). But the whole thing is quite shallow and is best approached from the right side, which allows you to play into a deeper aspect of the green. There’s a fantastic back-left pin on a peninsula, with your ball disappearing into the rock if you go a bit right, long, or left.

By any standard, the par 3 fifth must be one of the world’s greatest: ~240 yards over a black sand and gravel beach. Unlike some of the world’s famous long par 3s however, there’s plenty of room to bailout short and left and the smartest play (although less fun) is probably to the front left of the green. I suppose that you could describe this hole as Iceland’s friendlier response to Cypress Point’s sixteenth hole.

The last four holes here are inland but each is interesting. It’s about a 200 yard carry over a ditch on the ~365 yard sixth. After that, the approach is uphill and you can only see the top of the flagstick. But it’s best to be up the left side as the green is quite deep from this angle.

Seven is a tough ~400 hole with water up the entire right side. It’s best to aim at and pick a club that will keep you short of the 150 (meters) post on the left side. The approach is uphill to a large green which you should try to hit on the fly, but where there’s also the possibility of a rebound off the rock (there’s also a possibility of going from one set of rocks to another as I learned…). In any case, don’t miss long as the green has severe back-to-front pitch.

The short par 3 eighth is only about 120 yards from the seventh green on a direct line but following the cart path doubles that. This is another case like the second where the walk to the hole is longer than the hole (~130). The primary feature here is a ridge running left-to-right across the middle of the green. Hit the back of this and your ball will go through the green.

Nine is about a 540 yard par 5 from the back tees and is probably the easiest hole so far, as long as you can avoid the small pile of rocks in the middle of the fairway about 300 from the tee (reachable because the hole faces eastward and is probably downwind most of the time). The layup is to a wide fairway but the green, which angles from front-right to back-left, is best approached from the right. It has excellent interior contour.

Probably the best way to describe Brautarholt at the moment is as possibly the world’s most spectacular nine hole course with three bonus holes. Apparently there’s a plan to expand the course to 18 holes. Continuous expansion seems to be a common practice in Iceland as Keilir started as 9 holes, then became 18, then 27. I’m not exactly sure where the addition six holes will be, but there’s a lot of good undulating land right of the current seventh and eighth holes. It won’t be as spectacular as the current 1-5, but could be comparable (if a little less dramatic) than the lava holes at Keilir.

More even than Keilir, this course feels like a real adventure. It’s almost completely hidden from everything around it. To reach it, you have to go off-roading through about half-a-mile of grazing land. It’d be a great place to go hiking without golf clubs. The cliffs and surrounding scenery are also much more dramatic here although like Keilir, the former are used well to create some excellent holes.

Brautarholt may not be a championship test of golf like Keilir, but it has some outstanding holes and save for a few too many bunkers on the first and an awkward walk to the second, no real weaknesses. The fifth must be on the short list of the world’s great par 3s. Like Keilir, it has an outstanding set of greens. That was one of the real surprises of these two courses—both have a set of greens that compares favorably with the best sets of greens on southern English courses. They’re suitable counterparts to the drama from tee-to-green without ever being too severe.

While I can’t say that they beat a hike up to the base of Snaefellsjökull, glacier climbing, or a day in the pools and steam rooms of the Blue Lagoon, golf should still be a required part of any golfer’s trip to Iceland. There are several other courses around Reykjavik (you’ll see them driving around its outskirts) and while they’re probably not as dramatic as Keilir or Brautarholt, a few of them are supposed to be quite good. There’s also a course in the Westman Islands about 2 1/2 hours + a short ferry ride southeast of Reykjavik that has several holes on the cliffs and also looks excellent. If I go back to Iceland, a visit to some of these courses would definitely be on my list.

Iceland certainly isn’t likely to register much of a signal on anyone's radar of golf destinations. Yet the country has more golf courses per capita than any other. You start to get the clue when you drive anywhere around the country—almost every town seems to have a golf course next to it. And at least in the summer, the conditions are perfect for golf—the cool, moist weather is perfect for growing fescue and the long days enable you play almost as many holes as you want. It reminded me of playing golf in Scotland.

All that plus the country’s well-known spectacular landscapes make golf something that’s definitely worth doing if you go to Iceland, if not being worth the trip there in itself. And if you’ve only dedicated one day to playing golf like I did, the question is where to go. Like a lot of people would, I did this by looking at a ‘best courses’ list, in this case the UK-based top100golfcourses.com. They do a very good job ranking English courses, so I figured—especially for a lack of other sources—why not use their list here too?

And the course that they ranked number one was Keilir Golf Club, about 15 minutes south of Reykjavik and just off the highway into town from the airport (you can see the front nine if you’re looking). So I decided to book one round here and one round at the spectacular-looking 12 hole Brautarholt course, about 45 minutes away on the north side of Reykjavik.

While I don’t know how it compares to some of the courses that I didn’t play, I’d certainly call Keilir a ‘must play’ if you’re going to Iceland and want to play golf. And it should probably be at the top of the list given its proximity to Reykjavik and how it manages to capture a lot of the spectacular variety of Iceland’s landscapes. The two nines are very different from each other; the front nine plays through a generally flat lava field, without bunkers but with ground contours reminiscent of the great links courses while the back nine is a sloping piece of land on the high cliffs, a bit reminiscent of Pennard or Southerndown in Wales…although with even more spectacular holes on the cliff’s edge.

The two nines are very different in character and one might raise that as a point of criticism of the course. It didn’t really bother me because the holes are consistent in design character. Both nines have an excellent set of greens with good variety. There are simple greens at the end of complicated holes and complicated ones at the end of simpler ones. While the front nine has all the hazards it needs with the lateral lava fields, the back nine has quite a few bunkers (many sod stacked) and some carries over cliffs to match the challenge of the front. While the course is only about 6,500 yards it’s plenty challenging, especially given the ever-present wind and rain.

This course has changed a lot over the years, starting as 9 holes on the cliff top, then expanding to 18 holes there, then 27 holes with 9 holes in the lava and the original 18 redesigned into 9 big course holes and 9 par 3 course holes. There were several new holes on the back nine and the club looks like it’s making one final change (by the British duo Mackenzie and Ebert), converting the par 3 tenth and par 4 eleventh into a par 5 and adding what looks to be another spectacular par 3 on the cliff’s edge. I’m not sure whether the next round of changes will improve the course but there’s no doubt that this club has shown a desire to continually try to improve their course.


The drive from the airport to Reykjavik is mostly through a lava field and the contours will remind a golfer who has played a true links course a lot of those. Of course for building a golf course, that’s where the similarities end—on links land, you can just plant grass on the existing soil while here, you have to either cover the lava with an enormous amount of top soil or bomb your way through it…and then cover it with an enormous amount of top soil.

​The drive on the par 5 first is quite intimidating between lava fields on the left and right. There’s actually a lot of room over the lava on the right if you can carry it about 220 from the back tees…which wasn’t happening for me into a stiff wind with my 11.5 degree rental driver. My first shot of the day landing in the gravelly edge of the lava on the left and I opted to pitch out rather than take a full shot chance ending my round with a broken wrist after one shot.

The rest of the hole is fairly wide open but I was struck by the contours of the ground—they reminded me of some of the best links land that I’ve played (a ’Lava Links’ is a perfect name for it). And the fairways are mostly fescue and rye, so they play similarly too. It’s best to approach the small, flat green from the left side because the fairway is a bit flatter over there and the green angles from front-left to back-right between lava mounds.

The ~375 yard second has, at least from the back tees, probably the most intimidating drive on the course. The fairway narrows between the lava fields at 200 yards and into the wind, it felt like there was nowhere to hit it. Again, the hole opens up past about 220 yards. The approach is to an elevated green over a lava mound, which kicked my ball right onto the edge of another lava mound.

​I was pretty concerned after the first two holes that I was playing a course that was just too difficult to play in any kind of wind, which is of course most of the time here. But I felt that the course became a lot more reasonable starting with the sub-300 yard par 4 third. The green is hidden behind lava and you can only see the top of the flag from most of the fairway.

But the fairway opens up past about the 240 mark and if you can get it here, you’ll have a simple shot straight onto the green. This is a very intimidating shot from the tee because you can’t see any of this landing area over the lava from the tee. But if you can put that out of your mind, there’s a lot of risk in the reward. Unlike the simple first two greens, this one has heavy contour and is excellent.

Turning back down wind, four is a simple, slightly downhill par 3 of about 165 yards. Not much trouble around the green but the green has wonderful subtle contours.

Also fortunately downwind was the 450+ yard par 4 fifth. The objective with the drive is to just keep it between the lava but the approach is a real beauty: the green is just beyond a gentle ridge which messes with your depth perception (I was 15 yards short), open in front, and slopes gently away to the middle. This green complex would fit in very well on many of the finest links courses.

Six is an excellent short (~150 yards) par 3. It’s much more intimidating than four thanks to all the lava around the green. And if you go at any pin on the right side of the green, you’ll be trying to hit to within a few feet of it. Any push will play plinko in the lava. But what makes the hole so good is that you can see plenty of safe area left of the green and easily play to it.

The par 5 seventh resulted in a new experience for me. The landing area on seven is generous but when you get out there, the grassed area continues to the left. So I laid up that way and hit my third shot over a pond to a green tucked back to the left in a way that the hole was shaped like a big reverse question mark. I thought that this was the first really stupid hole that I played.

And that’s because I hadn’t played the seventh hole: I played the first half of the seventh hole and then the second half of the eighth hole, which I didn’t realize until I saw the sign after the green directing players to the ninth tee. The second shot on the actual seventh hole was blind to the right over the lava. Turns out that the actual hole is a really good one because the carry over the lava is diagonal and the more that you bite off, the closer you can get to the green. If you bail left, you leave yourself an awkward angle and view into the green.

The actual eighth hole, ~380 yard par 4 plays to the widest-appearing fairway so far, although the lava doesn’t cut in on the left at about 250 yards. The course’s one water hazard on the right shouldn’t come into play. The approach is partially obscured by lava but is to what might be the course’s best green; angled front-left to back-right and sloping upward in this direction, with an interesting bowl at the front-left and running off on the right side.

Nine is another simple driving hole if you can’t reach the lava at about 285 down the right side. But the approach is very awkward, with a blind pond covering the left side of the shallow green in front. Probably my least favorite hole on the course.

Although it’s maybe two dozen yards from the ninth green, the par 3 tenth has a completely different feel from everything that’s come before, playing downhill with no lava to a large, undulating green at the sea’s edge. I liked this hole but it is behind replaced by a par 5 that encompasses both this and the next hole.

The next hole, a short par 4 starts from what will be the landing area of the future par 5 and it looks like there will be few changes on the second half of that hole from the current hole. This is a good this because the current hole is excellent: about 340 yards along the cliff with bunkers on the right edge of the fairway in the driving zone. It’d be a fantastic hole for long hitters, who could challenge the cliff to get near the green…although I’m not sure how feasible that will ever be given the cold and the wind. For the rest of us, the further you lay up to the right, the better the angle into the narrow green perched on the cliff’s edge.

Twelve is a medium-length par 4 with an up-and-over blind drive. This hole will be lengthened and played to a new green, becoming the finishing hole. The current green is a quirky one, perched off the edge of the hill overlooking the tenth. This hole reminded me of something that you’d find on an old countryside English course and I liked it. The new hole will be stronger and look more modern, consistent with the direction that the club is taking its course.

But the thirteenth hole, a new short par 4 that will become the tenth, ensures that the course will keep some of its English quirk. It’s a completely blind drive over a field of rocks with an aiming post. I think that you want to aim right of the aiming post because the fairway slopes hard right-to-left.

We go from quirky to brutal with the long par 4 fourteenth—at least if you play the back tees. From here, it’s one of the most dramatic and difficult drives that I’ve ever seen, over the edge of the bay and some (I think) fishing houses. The carry looked a bit long for me, especially with rental clubs. Turns out that I was right: it’s about 225 to carry the seawall from here even at the nearest point!

But it’s a great drive for everyone because it retains the same great diagonal carry from the middle tees. From the fairway, the green is fairly open if you carry a bunker about 20 yards short and left. While very difficult, this is a great risk-reward hole.

The difficulty doesn’t let up with the 210 yard fifteenth. There isn’t much room to bailout thanks to two pot bunkers left of the green but you can lay up short and left if you don’t feel up to the challenge. I nailed a three-wood, which got me to the middle of the green. A great par 3, especially if you don’t think that extreme difficulty shoudl count against a hole.

Sixteen, a par 5, is the third consecutive hole that follows the water’s edge. The drive is almost as dramatic as that on fourteen, although you can also play safe away from the cliff. It’s about a 250 yard carry over the cliff right of the rightmost of the fairway bunkers although again, into the wind and cold weather.

The are two bunkers in the middle of the fairway about 100 yards short of the green then two more at its entrance on the left. The lay up here reminds me a bit of that on fourteen at Royal St. George’s because the best placement is between the bunkers and the cliffs edge. But unless you can easily carry the bunkers, it’s probably best to lay back short of them. The green seemed pretty new—all fescue.

It also looks like the club has been tinkering with the ~360 par 4 seventeenth because the bunkers looked newly constructed and there was new grass in the fairway. Despite the short length on the card, the hole was quite difficult as it plays pretty good uphill and looks tight between all the bunkers.

More evidence that the hole is new is that Google Earth doesn’t show it…meaning that I also don’t know how far it was to reach the bunkers off the tee. In any case, laying back to no more than 230 off the tee keeps you safe.

Eighteen is a long par 4 which will become fifteen in the new routing. That’s a bit of a shame because this is a truly great hole and a fitting conclusion to the round. There’s a bunker somewhere to the right off the tee but plenty of room to miss left and no reason to challenge it.

The important thing here is that you hit a long drive because there are a variety of challenges on the approach. First, a rock wall and road cross the hole about 50 yards short of the green. If you’ve hit a weak drive, it’ll be a challenge to carry the wall. If going for the green from long distance, it’s important to hedge left as there’s open fairway here and the ground slopes left-to-right. If you go at the green and miss short or a bit right, you can run about 20 yards down a steep hill to the right, leaving a nasty shot into the narrowest aspect of the green.
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I love a good long par 4 and this is one of the best that I’ve seen.

Playing golf in Iceland might seem odd to a golfer traveling from abroad. It doesn’t seem like a place where people would play golf and it fits a bit oddly into a travel itinerary filled with hiking, glacier climbing, and dips into hot springs (and eating the infamous fermented shark which—spoiler alert—just tastes like ammonia).

But golf at Keilir isn’t odd at all. This is a strong, challenging golf course which, as evidenced by the continuous changes to the course, the club takes very seriously. The course is very thoughtfully designed, with plenty of challenge in the form of lava on the front nine and strategically placed bunkers and choices regarding carries over the cliffs’ edges on the back. And I thought that this set of greens was better than those on at least half of the much more famous courses that I played in the UK. Probably only Royal St. George’s, Royal Cinque Ports, and Woking had a set of greens clearly better than these.

So I think that Keilir is a perfect part of an Iceland trip for the golfer because the course captures a lot of the spectacular scenery of the country (the cliffs, the lava fields) while allowing you to play golf at the same time. And it will potentially be even better when they convert ten and eleven into one par 5 and build another spectacular cliff’s edge par 3 after it. I wish I had gotten a picture of it—it will play slightly downhill with the ocean directly left of/behind the green. There will be a ~180 yard walkback up the hill to the eighteenth tee, so there’s a bit of a trade-off in that. I suspect that the trade-off will be worth it for all but the strictest routine curmudgeons.

In any case, the other sixteen holes that aren’t being changed are almost all very good to excellent so if you do show up, whenever you do, you’ll experience an excellent course, one that would be a top 100 public course in the US and one at which I’d be happy to play the majority of my golf.