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Crail Golfing Society, SCOTLAND
When the decision was made to build a second course on the acreage beside the Balcomie golf course at Crail (the 7th oldest golf club in Scotland), the question remained who should design it. Located twenty minutes in a car from the university town of St. Andrews, the clifftop property affords views to the south of North Berwick and to the north past Carnoustie. Would the Society elect to go with a professional golfer-turned-architect as at Loch Lomond and Gleneagles or would they go with a professional architect? In selecting Gil Hanse, the Society ignored the trend and Hanse became the first professional American architect to build a course in Scotland. Hindsight shows that the Society made a correct decision because a very fine course is the result despite there being several limitations that complicated the design task. Firstly, the property was only 114 acres, which is small for a windy site, and that was exacerbated by the fact that it was irregular in shape. Also, though the property is located along the coastline of the North Sea, it is clifftop and as such, it isn’t true links land blessed with natural humps and bumps. Indeed, the property is on broadly sloping ground with holes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 9, 10, and 11 on one side of a gentle hillcrest and the remaining holes on the other.
Another limitation on Hanse was that an ancient stone wall randomly crossed the property. As Hanse tells it, 'One of the most interesting challenges we had to deal with at Crail was the emphasis on the archaeological importance of the site. Running through a section of the site is The Danes Dyke, which is a wall that was erected by the Danes and it precedes the birth of Christ. Adjacent to the course is the ancient harbour of Crail, which is one of the oldest harbours in Scotland. The Vikings would land in this harbour and then set forth to rape and pillage the Fife countryside. After some bruising battles, they finally erected a wall as a last line of defense, before getting in their boats and setting sail for home. Needless to say, this is a very important archaeological site, and one that is remarkably preserved. Our challenge was to route the golf course on a small piece of property, and use this wall as a strategic feature because their was no way to avoid it. With the archaeological interest in the site, the Club had to hire a full time archaeologist to follow us around site. So whenever, my associate Rodney Hine, or I went to shape a green or bunker, this guy had to sift through the dirt before we could proceed with final shaping. It worked our okay, because he was a good guy, and oddly enough he was Danish. I also think that we used the wall in several creative ways, as well as in varied ways on the holes that it intersects. It does create a few blind situations, however, the Scots are not as squeamish as we are about blind shots, and I thought that this might be a great opportunity to incorporate the element of blindness into one of our courses. '
Yes indeed - the task of routing the holes was never going to be easy. Hanse was determined to make the sides of equal interest and wanted to get to the shoreline on both the outward as well as the inward nine. In addition, he appreciated that constant changes in direction were a must for the windy location. After mulling over countless routings, Hanse finally found one that would accommodate such requirements. One of the keys was that in the tightest spots on the property, he cleverly placed the shortest two shotters (3, 10, 11, and 12) and two of the one shotters (7 and 13).
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