Rich:
What you saw at Burghley Trials is additional support for a connection between Capability Brown's landscape design style and golf course architecture as it migrated out of Scotland into inland sites first in England in the latter half of the 19th century.
But we need to then look at what that connection was directly. In other words what are the actual similarities between a Capability Brown landscape designed "park" or parkland estate and an inland golf course in England on one of those Brown "parks", for instance?
To understand that we need to reiterate what golf course architecture actually is. We need to always remember well what the component parts of golf architecture are, in other words.
We know that the first component part of golf architecture involves "routing" a course. In the old days they may've referred to that semi-separate process as "laying-out" a course. That involves just staking starting points for holes, tees, the basic direction of a hole and an ending point, the green. When that has been done eighteen times how those separate eighteen entities appear and particularly how they relate to one another on land is a "routing" or an old fashioned "lay-out".
At that point an architect can actually walk away having contributed to the first essential component of golf architecture, and a number of the original architects in Victorian England in the latter part of the 19th century probably did walk away at that point having been paid for just that service.
But then, for lack of a better term, I've called the second basic component part of golf course architecture the "designng up" phase. In this stage various necessary features, if they do not exist naturally, are added to that basic routing or layout---eg man-made teeing areas, man-made fairway sizes and shapes, particularly man-made obstacle feature arrangements and shapes and sizes such as pits, mounds, berms, bunkering etc and green shapes and sizes and desgins, if none naturally exist.
We can see that golf courses can have a little of that "designing up" phase or a lot of it. We also know, if we think about it (which obviously some and some on here don't
) that an architect could probably create in that "designing up" phase a dozen or more courses that look remarkably different from one another and play remarkably different from one another, and, again, all on the exact same "routing" design or "layout".
Now, what was it that Capability Brown offered directly to the art of golf course architecture that it used in more than an insignificant number of cases to evolve and perfect itself to some extent?
We know that the massively landscaped "parks" that Brown did on some of the enourmous English estates of 18th century England offered sites on which golf architectural "ROUTINGS" could be utilized in ways that had not been used before in the art of architecture which at that time (in the 1860s, 1870s, 1880s and 1890s) was the beginning of the art of golf architecture itself. We should also note that this initial golf architecture followed Capability Brown's life and career in landscape architecture by almost a century.
What was different about Brown's landscape architecture style from the man-made styles of landscape architecture that preceded him and apparently made him one of the most significant landscape architects in English landscape architecture history?
He basically utilized flowing and curving lines with features such as curved man-made lakes, hills (sometimes man-made) and such and somewhat random arrangements of trees amongst open space (vistas), also man-made.
This was a something of a massive departure from the English landscape styles that preceded him which were baroque, or geometric lines of classical Greek and Roman landscape styles (Augustan) sometimes referred to as "neo-classical.
Brown's basic style was such a departure it took on its own name for which he is given almost sole credit. It came to be known as "Serpentine". Essentially that was Capability Brown's basic landscape architectural style.
But we can easily see by looking at drawings of Brown's landscape architecture that frequent serpentine characteristic---eg long flowing curved lines. We can also see if we look at the drawings of golf courses and their component hole forms that were to come many years later many of them also utitilize those serpentine curves and formations characteristic of Brown's unique style.
So, some of the first early golf course used his "park" or parkland sites for their routings and those routings became more sophisiticated because of it, more naturally appearing in an over-all "layout" sense. And perhaps most important of all we need to recognize that the size and scale of Brown's designs and "parks" were large enough in fact to put the entire routing of a golf course seamlessly into it or on it. I would very much doubt that this was ever true of something like a Gertrude Jekyll style English cottage garden or that landscape style that would follow Brown by another century again.
But what about some of the "designing up" characteristics of most of those "Victorian" age early courses on many of those original "park" sites of Capability Brown that really were quite natural in their overall arrangements and "lines" and formations?
We can see that many of them had individual architectural features, particularly pits and mounds and berms and bunkers, that were remarkably artifiicial, geomtric and man-made looking---basically the opposite of Nature itself?
(Setting aside for a moment, the differences between the necessities of the merely "aesthetic" and the necessities of "sport" man appears to have borrowed a type and style of obstacle feature on early golf courses in particularly inland England in this early age of golf architecure that were readily available to him and understandable. Enter the world of the horse and the recreational sport component of the world of the horse---eg such as steeplechasing which is not hard to tell now was prevalent and readily available to these early golfers and architects in inland England. I'll get back to this in another thread.
Why was that? Why might man inherently tend to make things geometrically? Probably because man inherently tends to make things that are precisely arranged and defined as they had in Greece and Roman a millenium before, and in English landscaping a century or so before Brown. Obviously man must feel this is showing his precision---his ability to be precise and defined. And obviously he must feel this puts him apart from Nature itself, perhaps even apart so as to be even better than Nature which he traditionally observed as random helter-skelter, sometimes dangerous and threatening and more than a little unexplainable.
Enter "God" who morphed out of the previous world of the mythologies of Nature itself as an invented method of explaining the unexplanable characteristics of the natural world around us.
Then enter the Age of Reason when man began to order and categorize all that he observed of Nature to more fully understand it and what it meant to him, how he might more understandably co-exist with it.
Enter from this age of Reason the concepts of the "Sublme" and then the "Beautiful" and then the "Picturesque".
These were essentially "ideas" that were evolving as man attempted to deal with nature around him, and then to a much larger extent to appreciate the beauty of Nature in its randomness.
In the beginning of golf architecture outside the beautiful natural formations of the land of the linksland (not man-made) on sites that were in most every way unsuited to natural golf (in look, soil structure and natural features) perhaps very few, if any, even realized how important the natural formations of nature really were to golf itself. This realization probably and logically took some time (as Sean Arble said perhaps 10-25 years or more). Over a few decades they obviously came to realize that these types of artifiical, geometric Victorian formations only offered a "penal" characteristic to the playing of the game and not the "strategic" characteristic of natural linksland unaltered by man (pre-golf course architecture).
And so in the component of golf architecture I call the "designing Up" phase they began to cast their eyes and minds back to the only thing that existed for golf before man-made architecture existed---the natural formations of the linksland.
And at that point they began to try to mimic it in every way and component of golf architecture---in the "routing" component and in the "designing up" component.
And the first evidence of it appeared inland in the English heathlands by Park. And the Golden Age of golf course architecture, particulary on inland sites around the world, began.
Hopefully, this will more clearly show how and why this "new beginning" of more natural man-made golf architecture in all its components that originated for the first time on inland sites in the heathlands was basically just a logical evolution and progression out of what had come before it---eg the first migration of golf out of Scotland and what was done for a few decades following that, which combined to create an increased awareness (because of the lack of quality of that early era) of the importance of golf's natural component which was the early linksland courses pre-man-made architecture.