I played three public courses for the first tome over the weekend in Northern New England, Canterbury Woods GC just north of Concord, NH, Woodstock Inn CC just over the border in VT, and Atkinson Resort GC in Southern NH.
A few notes on each:
Canterbury Woods hosted the '06 NH Amateur, and this Ross Forbes course is a decent layout at an exceptional value ($25 after 2pm!). I've seen many of these lower-budget forest courses in N.E. suffer from their sites because they refuse to remove enough trees to make the course playable, or for the challenges to be seen beyond the player's desire to "just hit one between the wickets." At CW, Forbes devised mounding on the edges of his fairways and greens to assist the player in finding his target, a practice that increases the effective width of the playing area. Once you realize they are meant to be used (as opposed to being ornamental), the course becomes great fun. It's not overly long, and has a few great gambling holes (#2, #5, #12, #15, #16) and dropshot par 3s (#6, #11, #13). There are several greens, also, that seem to be original designs (#7 especially), with random slopes and subtle borrows, a departure from the formulaic tiering and lay-of-the-land green contours. I was not familiar with Forbes' work before CW, and I'd seek it out in the future.
Woodstock CC is a very old course, built in the Woodstock area in the late 19th century, and moved down into the valley containing the Kedron Brook sometime around 1900. Donald Ross remodeled the course in the late 30s (not on site however), and the current layout was devised by a complete remodeling by Robert Trent Jones in the 60s. In the last two years, the course has gotten a new irrigation system, as well as an updating of bunkering by Roger Rulewich. The course is short at just over 6000 yards par 70, but demands accuracy. The layout crosses the Brook 12 times over the course of the rounds, sometimes twice on the same hole, and it's found fronting greens on holes 4, 5, 6, 11, 12, and 15. The bunkering is definately Jones/Rulewich (large in size, flashed sand with new more angular capes and bays), but the cramped routing (the valley floor is no more than 2-3 holes wide at any point) and greensites are decidedly old-world. Jones retained the classic-era small pushup greens, and occasionally wrapped a narrow tongue of green around a greenside bunker, especially on the back nine. Old growth trees line many fairways in single file, and some could use a limb-trimming, but they eventually open to allow long views over the valley to the surrounding hills. A good resort course, its good conditions luckily reflect one of the highest greens fees in Vermont. If one is looking for a good score on a very pretty course in one of N.E.'s most idyllic leaf-peeping towns, then Woodstock CC is the course for you.
Atkinson is a resort course in Southern NH, designed by Wogan and Sargent to accompany a medium-sized stay-and-play hotel and restaurant. The layout plays through some dense woods, and is very flat for a N.E. woodland course. The key feature at Atkinson is its lack of width, as most holes leave little room for error or recovery. Although well-conditioned, the course is doesn't really flash its best features at the player until the back nine, and they come at the expense of playability to anyone but the straightest striker of the ball. The crescendo comes at holes 10, 11, and 12, and the course probably would linger in the mind longer if the back nine continued like this, but it reverts back to the flattish, tree-lined holes found on the front nine. The course is eminently fair, however, and is certainly a notch above some of the weirder more homemade layouts one finds in abundance in NH.
-Brad