Bob
You've already answered AHughes question, but I wanted to ask it in a slightly different way, to try to understand it better. Do you think it's accurate to say:

"The locations of all the bunkers at TOC are informed by human agency, including those pre-existing bunkers not created by man, which bunkers were then utilized and incorporated into the design by said human agency".    

Thanks
Peter

Peter - Yes.

AHughes - I have no empirical evidence for my theory. But then the proponents of the goat, sheep, rabbit and divot theories have no empirical evidence supporting their theories either.

What my theory has that their theories lack is plausibiliy.

Bob

Adam -

The greatness of TOC doesn't derive from the greatness of its isolated features. Its greatness is due to the relationships between those features. Those inter-relationships are what makes TOC so remarkably strategic.  

To explain those sophisticated relationships as the unintended by-product of (a) sheep returning to sleep in the same spot every night or (b) divots left by golfers (virtually all of whom are slicers) doesn't sound very plausible to me. In fact it sounds like a tall tale.

OTOH, there is a simple, plausible alternative explanation. The only thing it lacks is the misty romanticism of the traditional explanations for the origins of TOC.


Bob

"I have little doubt that golfers returning and playing from the same position explains a significant proportion of bunkers, especially those on the line of play."

Sean, this is where I get a bit confused with that line of thinking, and have some trouble with it:

TOC seems to be regarded by all the experts past and present as a wonderfully "strategic" golf course. If the bunkers there are a result of golfers often "playing from the same position," wouldn't those bunkers be almost entirely "penal" in nature?

I mean, if you put bunkers in the very place the average golfer has always (and will always) hit to, you're simply penalizing the average player.

My confusion is, I've never read anyone describing TOC as an example of "penal architecture" -- so, even though the theory seems plausible to me too, I have a hard time subscribing to it.

Peter      

Peter:

As for TOC and the idea of penal or strategic, history seems to tell us that TOC was once upon a time was not just a remarkably penal course but an increasingly dangerous one too as play increased.

Apparently it was pretty narrow---eg maybe 40 yards wide but the problem was golfers were almost constantly coming at one another on narrow shared fairways as the course was played out and back down those narrow corridors to common greens.

I think it might have been Lord Playfair who directed Alan Robertson (the man some consider to be history's first golf architect) to clear out the course of gorse or whatever and gave him something like 50 pounds to do that. That was real early in the evolution of golf architecture.

When the course was widened---and apparently widened for safety's sake it sort of instantly became strategic because those golfers coming at each other could take a lot more lines with the essentially melded contiguous holes going out and back.

I don't think this was done exactly at that time to create architectural strategy---it just sort of happened and evolved for other reasons, like a lot of things in golf. In the case of TOC's widening, it was done for safety basically.

TOC is considered to be the prototype of all architecture but after-all, how many golf courses have routings like TOC with so many contiguous (shared) holes in such a narrow over all band?

I bet TOC isn't much more than 200 yards wide. Do you see how unusual that really is in golf and why those basically double-wide fairways made the course instantly strategic because of that double wide concept?

Other golf courses around the world could do that but to do it like TOC's contiguous hole width they'd generally have to make each individual hole about the width of TOC's double wide routing that is basically a string of two holes in one constantly coming at each other (except for the "hook" at the far end).

Bob, it would seem only fair at this point to question what is your basis for saying all the bunkers at the Old Course were physically created by man. My understanding is that it is more your 'gut' then anything else?  

The story about the Road Hole bunker that I had always heard was Allan Robertson created it etc. But Ian Andrew's blog says:

the people of the town apparently used to dig in many of the bunkers to get shells and this location was a particularly good spot close to the town. The bunkers depth came from the people’s quest for shells; which eventually was stopped when the golf course became to busy and popular to allow this activity to continue.

Ian also mentions that an old map shows the bunker there when Robertson was only 17 (that map would be interesting to see--how many bunkers were there, how many have been added and removed etc. Ian, are you listening?  )
So is this an example of a bunker that man created (independently of golf) and then adapted for golf? Was the green placed so as to maximize the use of the already-existing bunker? Bob, is this an example of what you are thinking?
Also, it strikes me as odd that there are so many bunkers scattered throughout the course, but no real records of when they appeared or who dug them or had them put in if indeed man created most/all of them.

AHughes -

We have two competing theories. There is the rabbits and divots theory and there is the hand of man theory.

Neither theory has any empirical evidence to support it.

First, that means the proponents of either theory are not in a position to have "little doubt" about their views.

Second, when there is no convincing evidence that cuts for one theory over another, you fall back on the one that is most plausible.

So let's do the plausibility analysis. Let's ask two questions:

Is there evidence at other courses where sophisticated strategic bunkering arrangements were derived from rabbits and divot holes? I don't know of any.  

Is there evidence at other course where sophisticated strategic bunkering arrangements were derived from human planning? Yes. Every other course I am familiar with.

That's what I'm saying.

Bob

What does everyone think about this -- apologies if everyone already was operating under this assumption and as usual I was obtuse:

My original assumption was that man chose the land, set the tees and holes, and then rabbits and sheep followed.  Bunkers thus were formed by rabbits, sheep, and man, but man's being along the line of play, and animals wherever.

But was the reality really the reverse of this? Given the complete lack of agronomy, is a more-likely assumption that man located where the turf was amenable to the game?  And that the choice of linksland was a product of:

1. Land useless agriculturally, so that no one sought to keep off animals or undo their "destruction" of the land,
2. Place where rabbits and sheep already roamed, providing a closely-mown, ready for play surface?

I assumed that man chose the land and "built" the course first, and sheep and rabbits then somehow "moved in" and started building bunkers over a course whose tees and holes already were fixed.

But isn't it more likely to have happened this way: man chose land where the sheep and rabbits already roamed.  He would have been confronted by a land where the animals closely cropped the grass, allowing for play, but that unfortunately was littered with sandy pits and rabbit holes -- an unfortunate byproduct of land otherwise ideal due to its closely-mown grass?  Where said bunkers were allowed to grow, and not immediately eradicated, because the land was worthless agriculturally?

In this scenario, rabbits and sheep did play monkeys at the typewriter.  Slopes in the lee and hollows -- later "collection areas" -- would have been pockmarked with "bunkers." This word in quotes, though, as it was meaningless before golfers came along to create and name the concept.

What happened next: golfers embued those bunkers with strategic meaning by choosing tees and holes that brought those features into play.  I assumed, certainly wrongly, a course whose location was fixed.  But surely golfers chose an already-pockmarked land, and eventually, somehow, figured out the game was made more interesting when they relocated tees and holes to bring those sandy areas into play.

Thus, before golfers = meaningless sandy pits.  After golfers = "bunkers."

So that's two theories:

1. Golfers chose land that already was heavily pockmarked with sandy waste pits and introduced the concept of strategic (or penal) bunkers through their choices of where to locate the tees and holes.
2. Golfers' repeated play.  Through their play, they opened gashes / divots in the ground that grew into bunkers positioned exactly where their shots sometimes finished.

In both cases, you could say that man is the source of the strategic bunker, but this discovery was serendipitous; i.e., not the product of someone purposely building a bunker in a certain spot for "strategic" reasons.  That idea must have developed out of the original discovery.

I'm sure everyone has already thought of this and that I was just misreading the posts because of my probably-wrong perspective.

Now, as to the Wethered & Simpson position...

Bob C.: why do you see the man and rabbit theories as competing?

Here's another possibility: golfers chose land that was heavily pockmarked with sandy waste areas.  They located tees and holes to avoid as much of these as possible.  The idea was that these areas should be out of play.

But then something unintentional happened: through repeated play, golfers created their own sandy waste areas.  Because these areas fell within the boundaries of play, golfers could not avoid the conclusion: sandy waste areas can make the game more interesting.

Thus, the discovery of the strategic bunker...

Mark

Bob,

So one day a man with a shovel went on a lovely walk on the links and with only golf in mind dug some holes in the (thanks to the Rabbits and Sheep) close mown grass.  He did this because the game was way to easy for him, what with the fancy new 1820's model driver he'd recently purchased.  Behold over the next days or months or years he fine tuned these holes into a wonderful course.  Funnily enough no-one knows the name of this man or men.  This when humans are generally pretty good at documenting and promoting their achievments.  

I still have "little doubt" that "A SIGNIFICANT PROPORTION" of the bunkers on TOC were either made or inspired by natural erosion.  If said erosion was detrimental to the playing of golf perhaps it would be filled in by the players.  Perhaps one day some extremely bright cookie put forth the idea to "move that hole (bunker) from there over to there" as it would add vast stategic interest.  Over a few hundred years of erosion and remedies to this erosion why is it so hard to accept that the course just came to be that way..Due to erosion, divots and occasionally the intervention of man.

Also all this evidence you have of strategically placed bunkering.  Any of the architects ever cited TOC as their inspiration?

Maybe I should have put the question in Italics.  The fact that all these successful strategic minded architects use TOC as inspiration doesn't really provide evidence of either your theory or mine.

In short is it inspiration because it's natural and provides a base for what a golf course should look like?

Or is it inspiration because some really smart cookie/s between approx 1400 and 1840 went around digging strategically placed holes?

I think one of the best ways to even begin to answer this fundamental question about the beginning and evolution of various bunkers on a course like TOC is to determine just how long the greens have been where they are. We certainly do know that most all tees have changed from long ago golf at TOC not for the least reason being the fact of the Rule evolution on where a golfer must tee off from.  

My sense on this question is that we also probably need to look not just at bunkers but what those old "swards" (the precusor of what we know today as fairway) were and were all about.

My sense is that golf and golf features way back in the 18th century and earlier were basically a matter of what might be termed "path of least resistance" golf.  

That kind of thing wasn't really a matter of man "making" much in the way of architecture, it was more a matter of just playing on, around and over what was already there from the evolution and forces of Nature.  

But come about the middle of the 19th century all that obviously begun to change and probably changed very dramatically into something more along the lines of what we today think of as golf course architecture.

But I think we need to look more carefully at not what original bunkers were but what original "swards" were, and more importantly WHY (how they happened).  

I say that because if we understand "swards" (those unusual areas where original bents and fescues thrived without other vegetative competition) better we just may find that some of the original bunker formations and such were not much more than just "some of the rest" (those things other than "swards").

To understand better the way golf (and architecture?) once was before about the middle of the 19th century I don't think one can ever appreciate enough just how rudimentary (unaltered) it really was way back then.  

In the absence of any conclusive evidence, I will go with the the more plausible of the two theories. To think otherwise is to believe that the extraordinarily sophisticated strategies presented by TOC are primarily the work of chance.

I find that unlikely in the extreme

Bob, there is some logic to that, but it still doesn't sit well with me.

In Balfour's Reminiscences of Golf on St. Andrews Links, he talks about the course from around 1840 or so up through the end of the 19th century.  He talks about how narrow the course was in its original out and back configuration, "flanked by high whins for the greater part of its extent."

More germane to this discussion, however, Balfour says the course at that time was "studded with sand-pits".  Now, this says nothing about how the bunkers were created, but it does say something about the bunkers and their relevance to course strategy--the course at the time had lots of bunkers and was a penal exam, not the strategic course it would later become.  The golfer was forced to attack the bunkers and play over them.  Giving them a wide berth was not an option due to the narrowness and the whins.

When the course was later widened, those same bunkers that had studded the penal course now took on a strategic dimension--no longer was the golfer forced to play directly over Hell to play the 14th, rather he had options to choose from and choices to make.