Martin:
To me this is a completely fascinating subject---eg golf courses that were routed and built on "park" (land) estates.
The reason it completely fascinates me is it most certainly could show how golf course architecture was influenced by various adaptations of landscape architecture that came well before golf course architecture even began.
There was a good deal of discussion about this on some other threads in the last year that mostly were on the continuing discussion, nay, argument about the influence of the Arts and Crafts Movement (and it's offshoot the "English country" garden as primarily developed by such as Gertrude Jekyll). Obviously most of those discussions or arguments are too trivial, too deep or too contentious to be followed on here by most.
But what about those massive estates (parks) that had been utilized for the application of 17th-19th century "landscape architecture" on generally massive scale? There are some that were quite geometric in basic layout but more interesting were those that were the more natural lines of some of the early so-called "English Landscape" architects, namely the likes of William Kent, Lancelot “Capability” Brown and Humphrey Repton.
Perhaps the most interesting to me is the so-called “Serpentine” landscape architecture style that Capability Brown became noted for.
You can just imagine how that basic landscape architecture style on a massive scale could be ideally suited for the routing of a golf course in one of those massive English “Park” estates. I think that’s what became known as the “parkland” style golf course.
But the most interesting thing is Capability Brown, Kent, Repton did what they did up to a century or more before man-made golf architecture even began, yet what they did eventually had perhaps a significant influence on what golf architecture came to be, certainly in a routing sense known as the "parkland" style.