Ulrich,
Cape Breton Island is extremely mountainous. It rises sharply out of the sea, especailly in the Ingonish area. I am interested in Ian's description of the soils, as I wondered about the composition as I played the course. The course ascends a hill off the first tee and then tumbles mostly down hill to the 6th hole. It then ascends inland to the 9th green where the direction of travel turns and heads back towards the sea, some of that route along a river bottom, and some along bench ridge above the river to the 13 green. The 14th hole doglegs uphill, 15 tumbles back down, you cross a road and play 16 which inexorably climbs back in the direction of the point of beginning which is reached after playing the flatter 17th a par three with a marvelously contoured green, and then rising again as you play up 18. I don't know what the total elevation change for the course is but I would guess it to be well over 250 vertical feet. It repeatedly traverses heavily glaciated secondary mountain ridge.
Highlands, I was told, was built with one bulldozer and hand labor. Given how rough the surrouding terrain is, which is readily apparent as one peers into the surrounding boreal forest, I continually marveled at the genius of the place. While there are most assuredly engineering challenges in moving the sand around at Carne or in the Carolina pine hills area, the man hours of labor involved in shaping Higlhands out of that glacial till and moraine, must have been frightful. Just cutting all the spruce and removing the stumpage must have seemed most daunting to the men doing it, let alone painstakingly removing the millions of rocks and stones that must have been strewn every where on the property. No excavators, no TurboChieftan. That Thompson could build something so playable and memorable on that harsh terrain....he's every bit as good a designer as Mackenzie, Tillinghast, or Ross, in my book.
By the way, his routing at St. Georges in Toronto is a masterpiece as well as he repeatedly threads the course through and around a series of naturally occuring valleys on that site.