Ben:
Good topic, thank you for starting it.i looked at a site the other day that had a lot of cool features for golf holes, but my first instinct was that it was too severe to yield a walkable golf course. I have yet to build an unwalkable golf course. Yeah, Stone Eagle is unwalkable when it’s 100 degrees, but I have played several rounds there on foot, once in the company of three 70-year-olds.
Also, to this day, no course ranked in the top 200 in the world is unwalkable. I don’t preclude the possibility- and my mind is open to building 18 holes that are too severe to walk, if that’s all the land will give you. But I do think it says something meaningful that the rafters of the world have drawn that line in the sand.
I did walk the routing for Landmand last summer, and I thought it was not impossible to walk, albeit without a bag on my shoulder. But I do think the difficulty of the walk (especially the 17th) might hold it back s but in the rankings. Rob may say he doesn’t care about that, but I’m guessing he does.
I have, over the years, put more and more emphasis on shorter green to tee walks. One prominent example was moving the fifth green at Ballyneal and making the tee shot on the sixth blind, instead of putting the green at the base of the dune to the left and the tee up top, as I had first planned.