Fantastic views from the 18th green
come in with a landscaping rake to do the finishing and consolidating. Once I was convinced that all the angles were perfect and that everything was tramped tight enough, I would move on to the next one, which would invariably be ready for me to move right into. The first two week period went like clockwork, and Mrs Freeman was delighted to learn that we had 21 bunkers ready for Mark’s team to turf. A couple of weeks back at Machrie reconstructing our 12th green followed, before I returned to the Isle of Man for the next batch. We hit our only real snag during this second phase; a seam of rock at the 14th which saw Mark and I strapped to a pneumatic hammer drill for almost a whole day, removing over two feet of tightly packed slate from the pair of traps we built in front of the green. Apart from this minor setback, we battled on as well as before, completing 11 holes and 40 bunkers before I sneaked off back to my island hideaway for the winter.
At this point I had no idea how our work would be received, but the members seemed happy enough, and plans for phase 2 were quickly put into place. I was especially keen to get to work on the two par 5s during this stage of development, as they have become less than daunting now that golf club technology has brought long and straight hitting to the masses. Castletown’s fairways run faster than any I have ever played on in summer, and the 12th especially had ceased to provide a three shot challenge at all. We
12
There is hardly ever much call for making
unnecessary artistic statements that detract from the beauty of the surrounding landscape
decided to alter the teeing angle at this hole, using the existing left hand fairway bunker as the corner of a new dogleg. We then did the obvious thing and built a new bunker 30 yards further up the other side of the fairway, creating a thought- provoking landing area where there had previously only been a wide expanse of grass. The existing central fairway bunker, 100 yards short of the green, was moved slightly to the side (to actually make it central) before a pair of really evil cross bunkers were built, just 15 yards apart and 40 yards short of the green. Lastly, the greenside bunkers were tucked in tight to the front corners, to ensure that anyone who bailed out wide of the cross bunkers would have to come in over the deep greenside ones. That
may seem like a long-winded description, but I think the transformation of this hole shows how easily a mundane and relatively simple long hole can be improved dramatically just with a bit of thought. Four new bunkers and a repositioned tee was all it took to make every golfer completely change their attitude towards what they had previously considered to be a ‘mickey mouse’ hole. Sometimes, even one bunker can make a world of difference, and so it proved at the 7th, the par 5 upon which the first Derby race was run. As its name suggests, this hole is flat, but is made slightly more interesting by its slight dogleg from right to left.
The main problem at this hole was not lack of length, but the fact that the cleverly angled green had been left completely defenceless by pointless bunkering. While it is true that the work we did on the rest of the hole worked well, and digging out an additional bunker next to the existing one 150 yards short of the green gave the hole an extra dimension, it was the pair of new pot bunkers that we built right into the left hand bank of the green - just where the bottom tier forms into the top tier - that had the Manx locals calling for this Scotsman’s extradition. The rest of this year’s work went smoothly and was actually fairly mundane compared to what had gone on before but, to see the whole job completed within the allotted timescale and without spending an absolute fortune, is immensely satisfying. What we have done shows that it is
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