"If you want a golf course, go to a glacier"

[Brent Hutto]

I'm reading an old John McPhee book called "Annals of the Former World". It's about geography and in one section he travels along I-80 from Ohio into Indiana with a geologist named Anita Harris. Here's an excerpt that seems right up our collective alley.

The ice sheets set up and started Niagara Falls. They moved the Ohio River. They dug the Great Lakes. The ice melted back in stages. Pausing here and there in temporary equilibrium, it sometimes readvanced before continuing its retreat to the north. Whenever these pauses occurred, as in northeastern Indiana, boulders and cobbles and sand and gravel piled up in prodigal quantity--a cadence of recessional moraines, hills of rock debris. The material, heterogeneous and unsorted, has its own style of fabric, in which geologists can see the moves and hesitations of the ice, not to mention its weight and velocity. Scottish famers, long before they had any idea what had laid such material upon Scotland, called it till, by which they meant to convey a sense of "ungenial subsoil", of coarse obdurate land.

"This would be a good place for a golf course," Anita remarked, and scarcely had she uttered the words than--after driving two thousand yards down the road with a dogleg to the left--we were running parallel to the fairways of a clonic Glenagles, a duplicated Dumfries, a faxed Blairgowrie, four thousand miles from Dumfriesshire and Perthshire, but with natural bunkers and traps of glacial sand, with hummocky roughs and undulating fairways, with kettle depressions, kettle lakes, and other chaotic hazards. "If you want a golf course, go to a glacier" is the message according to Anita Harris. "Golf was invented on the moraines, the eskers, the pitted outwash plains--the glacial topography--of Scotland," she explained. "All over the world, when people make golf courses they are copying glacial landscapes. They are trying to make countryside that looks like this. I've seen bulldozers copying Scottish moraines in places like Louisiana. It's laughable."

[Steve Okula]

Being originally from Connecticut, I find it curious that there is such a dearth of good golf courses there. The state was covered in glaciers and has generally coarse, sandy, soil.

[Garland Bayley]

What we saw at Gleneagles was glacial eskers and kames.

[Keith Grande]

Alaska is the next China for GCA...

[Rich Goodale]

Steve O.

I grew up in Connecticut too (1951-1968) and was back there (Darien) just 10 days ago, at a HS reunion, wandering about as well as partying.  Geologically speaking, the good stuff that came from glaciation was called the "terminal moraine" (i.e. the place were glaciation ended and all the big rocks turned into small rocks and sand).  Connecticut was 10 to 20 miles north of this, and ended up with loamy soil punctated by lots of middle sized rocks (hence the stone walls and the small pastures).  Long Island, Fishers Island, Block Island, Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard and Cape Cod got the good stuff,  Hence their poorer agriculture and finer golf courses.

Rich

[Thomas Dai]

"Golf was invented on the moraines, the eskers, the pitted outwash plains--the glacial topography--of Scotland"

Oh well, guess you learn something new everyday!

atb

[Tom_Doak]

"Golf was invented on the moraines, the eskers, the pitted outwash plains--the glacial topography--of Scotland"

Oh well, guess you learn something new everyday!

atb

Yes, I've read this quote before, but the premise is just slightly off.  It is true enough that glacial land is ideal for golf, and that many modern golf courses are shaped in disharmony with their surrounding landscape -- whether it's glacial forms or something else that are being imitated.  But links golf came first, and faux links are just as prevalent and overpopulous.

[BCrosby]

Culver Academy (Indiana) is built on the shores of a kettle that filled to become a beautiful lake. The Academy's nearby golf course (Langford) was built on a terminal moraine.

In the Great Smokies, you will find large erratics (boulders) sitting in splendid isolation the middle of a forest, left there by retreating glaciers.

The clay on golf courses in Georgia is out-wash from the erosion of the Appalachian Mountains.

With a little geology, the most mundane locales can tell fascinating stories.  

Bob

[Doug Wright]

My first "aha" golf architecture experience occurred while riding with my family from SW New York State to the Albany-Schenectady area through the Finger Lakes, which of course were formed by glaciation during the Ice Age. There is an area south of Naples NY that features some dramatic rolling hills called drumlins*. My distinct thought at the time was "this would make great land for a golf course."

*Drumlins are cigar-shaped hills of till. These hills are steeper on the upstream end — that is the direction from which the ice flowed. In height, they rarely exceed 200 feet. There exist thousands of drumlins from Oswego and Syracuse to west of Rochester. One well-known example is Hill Cumorah, near Palmyra, where Joseph Smith reported seeing a vision that led him to found the Mormon Church.