Next time you are on the golf course ask yourself what part the bunkers play in the strategy of the hole and, if it’s not obvious, then it’s probably just there for show!
The Sands of Nakajima - the Road Hole bunker at the 17th at St. Andrews
Kiawah Island - where it’s appropriate to use extensive bunkering
stunning use of the natural environment. In the 1960s Pete Dye made the bunkers of his American courses famous by inserting railroad ties into the faces, mimicking the old Scottish tradition of riveting the faces (so done to prevent the Scottish winds blowing sand from the bunkers), but stopped this trend in the 1980s when it was too frequently copied. Robert Trent Jones Snr loved to mark his courses with the larger, maple leaf shaped sand traps that had three jagged edges, making it possible to get difficult trapped lies under the lips of the three edges.
These designers may have added character to their bunkering but it was always strategy that determined their placement.
The flow of a golf course is another crucial factor in determining how a designer will construct their bunker complexes. The course should flow well from hole to hole and have a balance in terms of testing holes and easier holes that present an opportunity to score well or pick up shots. Setting a bunker or bunkers
The Devil’s Aperture at Pine Valley Golf Club in the USA
30-yards short of the green on four straight holes would ruin the flow of a golf course and unfairly punish the shorter hitters. Ultimately, the experience of playing a golf course should still be enjoyable, as well as challenging. Today’s modern golfer has an
expectation that, when his ball goes into a bunker, it should be raked, soft, sandy and present them with an ideal opportunity to blast the ball out close to the hole. This is the downside of creating visually pleasing, perfectly manicured bunker structures - they have clearly lost that element of hazard and fortune that initially defined them.
Stunning use of the natural environment at Swinley Forest Golf Club in Surrey
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A perfect example of this is the disappearance of the ‘pot bunker’ from modern course
design. Modern golf courses increasingly use bunker-raking machines to produce the perfectly smooth raked surfaces. In order to do this, the bunker must be at least four metres wide for the machine to turn and the base can be no narrower than four metres, making the minimum dimension quite flat and preventing steep sidewalls being used. As such, there are few new courses built with pot bunkers, which is sad given the terrible hazard these bunkers present. I’m always fascinated when playing links golf and watching as a slightly off-line iron shot is collected up by a swale and hollow and the offending ball runs down to a small secretive pot bunker.
The use of larger catchment
areas to feed bunkers is a much used design element on links golf courses and less achievable on grassy inland courses, but it would be more interesting to see this tactic used as opposed to phalanxes of white sand traps dominating the landscape ahead of every green. Bunkers are like golf itself -
best kept simple - and like a simple rhythmic repeatable swing, can be an understated but deadly part of golf. Next time you are out on the course, ask yourself what part the bunkers play in the strategy of the hole, and if it’s not obvious, then it’s probably just there for show.
About the author: Tim Lobb is a partner of Thomson Perrett & Lobb based in London, working with five-times British Open Champion Peter
Thomson and leading Australian architect Ross Perrett. TPL have current golf course design projects underway in the United Arab Emirates, Turkey and Egypt. For more information, visit
www.tpl.eu.com
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