Golf


It’s not about the methods we use suiting me or how I was taught. The methods we use suit the course


planted, and you’ve got to maintain them with two different regimes.”


“With the older ones, we have to monitor the decay. They have a few problems with a bug that affects the beeches, but that doesn’t hit the little ones.”


“Trees are a big part of what we do, and we try to work at thinning them every year, depending on weather conditions ‐ we don’t do much of that in really wintry conditions.” “We have a Leylandii hedge near one of the tees, the roots of which start to encroach into the path of the tee when it grows too much.”


“We go in with a little digger and break up the roots to stop it affecting the growth there as much as it might.”


The course runs over around 230 acres, but Andy described a lot of it as “ground you try not to play off”, which highlights one of the challenges of the course.


Where the fairways are lightly rolling, a few of the rough areas are treacherously hilly. An errant ball at the correct length on that famous ninth, for example, will kick almost directly to the right by up to 50 yards. These struggle to accommodate some of the machinery, so Andy and the team’s


”


aeration solutions contrast with his background in mechanical greenkeeping: “It’s not about the methods we use suiting me or how I was taught. The methods we use suit the course. When we’re getting air into the dips and some of the fairways, we use a lot of hand tools. There’s slitting, there’s verti‐draining, there’s spiking.” “There are lots of dips and valleys out there. It’s about a mile long, but only about half a mile wide. It runs length‐wise to the hill, so the dips travel across the course directly.”


The par 71, 6,400‐yard plot was designed


PC DECEMBER/JANUARY 2018 I 15


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