Golf as a cross country adventure

[Thomas Dai]

Once-upon-a-time golf was usually something of a cross country adventure. Start here, finish here and traverse whatever landscape and features happened to be in the way as you went along.
Some courses, particularly quirky and rustic ones, still have an element of this but many courses no longer seem too.
Thoughts?
atb

[Adam Clayman]

That Freedom to choose one's own line, depending on conditions, is what's missing from the majority of modern courses posing, or marketing themselves, as good.


The prospect of identifying the tedium of dictated architecture, is felt by fewer, as there are fewer people that golf enough, to notice.
 

[Ronald Montesano]

You speak of a time when land was plentiful, available, and thought by golfers to belong to them. Isn't it better to have a course, than no course at all?


If you have an example of a modern design that has the acreage for the cross-country esprit, but opted out, share it. That will be valuable.

[Wayne_Kozun]

That cross country adventure is more the case on out and back types of courses, rather than more modern parkland courses that tend to loop back to the clubhouse after nine holes, and sometimes even more often than that.

[Mark Pearce]

Two observations.


At the Northumberland GC we have an annual Christmas event called Hugh's Long Hole.  It's a 2 hole 4bbb comp, with one club each.  The first hole starts on the first tee and the hole is on the 13th green.  The second hole starts on the 15th tee and the hole is on the 18th green.  Their is some competition to get early start times as some feel that the best route on the first hole utilises the 17th fairway so you want to be away before the first groups start coming the other way.  It does require real thought


One of the most enjoyable evenings I've had with GCAers was after the dinner at the Golspie/Brora BUDA, when Niall C, John Mayhugh and I went out and played from a tee nominated by the winner of the previous "hole" to another green on the course, choosing whatever route you wanted.

[Thomas Dai]

It doesn't have to a whole course to provide a cross country adventure, it can be one hole, so long as a closely prescribed corridor that must be adhered to isn't present.
atb

[Mark Pearce]

It doesn't have to a whole course to provide a cross country adventure, it can be one hole, so long as a closely prescribed corridor that must be adhered to isn't present.
atb

Yes, of course.  But the point is the same.  The challenge of plotting your route, working out if you can get from A to B via C is the same, unless, of course, the route is dictated to you by narrow playing corridors.

[Niall C]

Once-upon-a-time golf courses had swarms of grass cutting equipment called sheep resulting in a fairly open playing field. Easy to go cross country back then. Of course it also made it easy to re-route and redesign courses.

Niall