"Tom, do you think MacKenzie, Ross, or Flynn would have blown them to smithereens and buried what was left over?"
J:
Probably. I've never seen much evidence of rocks like that that close to play on their courses. They say that some of the traditional Ross mounds (that were often in sort of random places not necessarily that close to play) were basically the turfing over of rocks and debris.
On the other hand, Perry Maxwell redesigned a couple of holes at my Ross course and on one of them he did leave some rock outcroppings clearly sticking out of the faces of some bunkers around one of those greens. It's a very neat natural look in my opinion.
I did a routing around here and on at least one really natural landform green site that was basically the rolling top of a hill there were a bunch of rocks as close to the green as the ones in that photo but on my site they were all basically flat on the ground. But if a ball landed on any of them, and they surely would have, it definitely would've created a super high bounce.
Now that I'm on the subject of that routing I should mention that the green site of the next hole---a fairly short par 4 would've been built right on top of a pretty big underground cattle shelter. I had every intention of leaving the entrance of it open below the green so if a golfer happened to get his ball in there he'd probably have to just take out his putter and putt it back out the entrance.
And the next hole was going to have a pretty big and complex short par 3 green bordered all along the left of the green by a big stone drop-down wall.
So obviously I'm into rocks and stones and underground cattle shelters and stuff on a golf course.
Oh yeah, on the next hole which would've been close to 600 yard downhill par 5 there's a pretty little springhouse that definitely would've been hittable by a pushed drive right.