When particularly "inland" golf architecture first began to emigrate out of Scotland and began immigrating into particularly England in the second half of the 19th century, to not notice or acknowledge that its early features and specifically its early "hazard" features looked like (were formed on the model of) the obstacle features of the horse recreational world of that time, particularly steeplechasing, is to completely miss the obvious, in my opinion. And furthermore, we have one of early golf and early golf architecture's best observers and chroniclers, Bernard Darwin, who remarked;
“'The laying out of courses used once to be a rather a rule-of-thumb business done by rather simple-minded and unimaginative people who did not go far beyond hills to drive over, hollows for putting greens and, generally speaking, holes formed on the model of a steeplechase course.'”
In my opinion, remarks like Darwin’s above are both indicative and valuable to the understanding of how things were in early golf architecture of that time and why things were as they were at that time. To discount Darwin’s remarks, presumably to make some other point about why that early golf architecture looked as it did, or worse yet, to assume that Darwin must have been joking in what he said, is to do real disservice to an excellent observer and chronicler of that time and to also do disservice to a valuable piece of his observed information.
David Moriaty asked me to supply more early written examples that early golf architecture features looked like obstacle features on steeplechase courses. Thank you for supplying another written example SeanT.