I was going to start a new thread but as Jack got here just before me i'll add them here.
The new 9 at Carne has been in development for a long time and has had a complicated genesis. At the outset, Jim Engh put together a layout plan, which was amended by Carne to reduce the amount of earthmoving Jim's routing would have entailed. The construction started as a hybrid of Jim's design and the clubs, but some of these early constructed holes and greensites have now been abandoned in favour of the final layout, which has been put together by GCA's very own Ally McIntosh, ably assisted by Carne's indomitable golfing ambassador, Eamon Mangan, who has been at the heart of the development of the course since day one. Ally is slowly developing the final tees and green sites, which are being built when time and funds permit. The course is steadily nearing completion and with all the greens now in place and the fairways mown out, now finally looks like a golf course. And what a course it is going to be. Be excited, very excited about the new golf which will be on offer, probably with a soft opening in late 2013.
Discussions are still ongoing as to how the new holes are going to integrate with the existing 18 Eddie Hackett holes. At the outset they will probably operate as a third, stand alone 9, at least until they attain the same conditioning as the 18 hole course, at which time they could be merged with the back nine of the Hackett Course, in one of three possible configurations. I'm sure Ally will chip in to expand on these possibilities in due course.
And so it was this past weekend that I went to Carne in the company of Ally and Jack Marr and between the showers we played some golf and walked over the new 9 holes. The pics will follow in the next posting, as the text is now too long for me to put them here without that annoying stuttering you get when the text you are trying to type disappears below the text box!!!