I really am enamored with the 14th and am keen to see if others picked up on the connection to Royal Melbourne (West) 10.
The view off the tee is puzzling and even horrific: the pic above is taken from about 10 paces right of the tee. From the tee proper, all the golfer sees is gorse in front, gorse all down the left, trees over to the right, and directly ahead the gaping bunker pictured, with a flag sticking up behind. It looks like a redoubt, and we golfers invited to a game of "capture the flag," albeit one designed by the older brother who constantly teased you, who never crafted games you actually could win!
The prevailing wind is from the right, so if you wish to drive the green in most circumstances you will have to challenge not just the bunker, which is score-annihilating enough, but the gorse down the left -- unless you are capable of hitting a hook that rides a hook wind...but doesn't miss its stop! The alternative I suppose is to try for a straight ball the wind pushes back, but miscalculations are deadly: odds are you will find that obvious tree down the right.
That's not all: if you attempt the hook and miss long, and run through the green from the right, you will find that nasty bunker pictured back left. If you are capable, as apparently was Trip Kuehne in the 2003 Walker Cup, then good luck to you; this hole must be like a boring pitch and putt to the rest of us!
Depending on which tee you choose, the bunker is 220-240 to carry.
But that's only half the challenge: like so many others here, this green is a fallaway. So: carry the bunker, then stop it on a firm green running away from you.
I guess the weakness of the hole is that there's not a huge penalty in going a little long, although you can find gorse back there.
If you choose not to challenge the bunker off the tee, the play is an iron out to the right. But then you bring trees over there into play -- in particular that oak or gumdrop-looking tree clearly depicted -- especially considering A, the firmness of the turf, and B, the cant of the fairway to the right.
There's also hay over there, and as I recall, possibly a stream, although on holes of this sort I often find my mind's eye "helpfully" populates the margins with all manner of beasties and sea monsters.
Mitigating all this is that it is just an iron shot after all, and ingeniously the very same wind that may be said to challenge the risk-taking golfer helps the golfer who chooses this route. It helps keep him away from the trees, although it does bring more into play the fairway bunker. But there again the golfer must properly decide where to lay up ("Far Enough To" see the green but "Not So Far As" the bunker, trees, crap.)
Even if you execute the lay-up shot off the tee, your troubles are not over, for there's that back-left bunker now directly on your line, and let's not forget the fall-away green.
By now, if you've played RMW 10, this hole and its play sound similar, don't they? I know, they don't really look alike: Ganton's plays over relatively flat ground whereas RMW's plays across a valley, RMW's bunker is a yawning chasm versus Ganton's "silent killer" and there's quite the sting in RMW's tail (don't go long).
But here's the rub: in October 1912 MacKenzie was called in to recommend further changes. Among the holes he suggested changing was 14, where he recommended adding the hummocks (pictured above) to the fairway bunker so that it became visible from the tee.
Of course, there's more than a decades' worth of time from when he worked on Ganton to his design of RMW 10. The thoughts he must have thought...
I could probably go on like this regarding the 3rd hole, another short 4, as well. Man, just to think there are two great driveable 4s on this one course, dating nearly 100 years old...it gets ya thinkin!
Mark