"I think the crux of the debate (to me at least) is why did the early architects build such ugly "victorian" courses inland? How pervasive were they? And why didn't the architects copy/simulate the true links right from the start?
Why didn't they simulate the links? Was it cultural or was it practical/inexpensive . I'm not sure, since the victorian features are crude but they can be extensive and not necessarily cheap (see Eltham)."
Paul:
I think that's the crux of the debate too. Why did the early architects build such ugly "Victorian" courses inland?
In my opinion, the true and factual answer to that is very likely so much simpler than most on here are making it. To truly understand why those early courses that were golf's first migration outside the Scottish linksland one needs to keep reminding oneself at what point that was (the so-called "Dark Ages about 1875-1900) in the evolution of golf course architecture itself. At that point golf course architecture as we know it (golf architectural features designed and made by man) was only a few years old--not more than a few decades.
When one compares that fact to other art forms such as painting art, building art and architecture, even landscape architecture, all those art forms had already had evolutions within their art forms and disciplines that were hundreds and hundreds of years old, sometimes more than a thousand years old and hugely sophisticated for those times. Golf course architecture compared to them at that time was nothing more than perhaps a barely visible blip on the radar screen of life at that time.
Morris and his followers were reacting to something entirely different, basically many years of classical and formalized disciplines in so many art forms that had had huge doses of religiosity attached to some of them etc. Some of these art forms were expressions of man attempting to understand his place in this world. Was golf course architecture at that point remotely part of that? Hardly, as it had barely been born!
Sure golf had been played for a couple of hundred years in Scotland only and probably at less than a dozen or two golf courses. There was no golf architecture then. At the time Morris begun his revolution against classicism in building art and perhaps other art forms and against the dehumanization of the industrial revolution (around the middle of the 19th century) golf course architecture had barely been born and as such there was probably almost zero art attached to it anyway. Too many of us forget that. In my opinion, to understand golf architecture best you just have to keep in mind where it was at particular points in it's rather short history. We too easily forget that and try to lump it in with other things that were so much older and more sophisticated.
The very first examples of golf architecture when golf first migrated outside the linksland was unimaginably rudimentary for obvious reasons---eg most of the people using those early courses were probably just becoming familiar with the game itself.
Why were those early features so geometric and ugly? I think probably because no one gave them any thought anyway---and certainly not in any artistic way. I don't think there was an actual Victorian "style" of golf architecture per se, only the very first attempts at the expression of man-made architecture that happened to be during the reign of Victoria and during the Age known as "Victorian". The features in the first early attempts at golf architecture in America were even more rudimentary and geometric and we didn't live in Victorian England.
I think those ugly squared off generally sunken pits and geometric berms looked remarkably like the sporting fields of equestrianism and steeple chasing. Is it any wonder? That was a massively popular sport back then. Back then the horse and all that went with it was huge.
As Max Behr continually said geometric and squared features (artificiality) is simply the inherent "game mind" of man to precisely define his boundaries in his games.
I think that just as in America when Macdonald revolted against these geometric rudimentary first attempts at architecture outside the linksland for the first time a few others just before him in England (Park jr and some of the early heathland architects) probably just said; "Whoops, looks like we just took the game out of Scotland but we sure did forget to look at mimicing the way those almost wholly naturally created dune-laden courses back in Scotland are.
And so the very first attempts at making early man-made golf architecture a bit more natural looking began. At that point (around 1900) the entire history of golf course architecture was only a few decades old, and there wasn't even much of it. Other art forms, painting (Rushkin's milieu), landscape architecture (Lancelot Brown, Repton), building architecture etc were hundreds and thousands of years old and had all had rich and sophisticated histories.
Not so for golf course architecture as basically in comparison it had only recently been born, and was very much still in diapers.
The likes of Repton, Pugin, Rushkin, Morris etc probably knew nothing at all of golf itself and probably had never even heard of golf course architecture. No wonder it was so rudimentary, geometric and ugly then. Those who first brought it out of the linksland only a few decades before obviously knew nothing of what it really was or could be. As Behr said when they first took the game out of the Scottish linksland (about the 1870s) it took them a while to realize they left its elusive spirit behind and that a lot of that was its almost wholly unadulterated NATURAL playing fields.
Does that sound logical, Paul?