In the style of, and with many thanks to Ran -
Cape Arundel Golf Club
Kennebunkport, Maine
Walter Travis, 1921Cape Arundel Golf Club is known to many as the home course of President Bush and his father. To the student of architecture, it is also known as a largely untouched example of the work of Walter Travis. I plead ignorance to the architectural history of the course, and dare not describe anything but the joys of playing it.
Much has been written on this site about the "random" bunkering at St. Andrews. There is a strong element of this at Cape Arundel. There are bunkers of every shape, size, depth, and angle, at a bewildering variety of distances from the green. The greens are equally diabolical - almost all of them have a false front followed by maddening interior contours. In the summer months the whole course is extremely fast and firm, adding a great deal of further difficulty.
Finally, the course is charming. It measures 5881 yards, and plays to a par of 69. It is squeezed onto a small piece of land, not an inch of which is wasted. Indeed, there is a bunker two yards from the twelfth tee.
Holes of note
1 - 375 yardsIn order to see the green on your approach, a carry of 225 yards into the prevailing wind is required off the tee. The false front and interior contours of the green give you an idea of what is to come.
Play ball! 3 - 157 yardsThe Kennebunk River guards this green left and long, and there are two bunkers to the right. A steep hill repels the short tee ball. Cape Arundel presents a wonderful variety of par three holes, playing to disparate points on the compass and generally requiring of me eight iron, sand wedge, six iron and four iron.
Many of the greens are sprayed with shot repellent. Easily the greatest driveable par four I have ever played, and no, I cannot drive the ball 360 yards or even 300 yards. To demonstrate the huge difference that tee placement and line of flight can have in determining total yardage, I have devised an interactive yardage calculator. Below is an aerial photograph of the all-world fifth hole. The red dot indicates the back of the tee box, and the yellow dot indicates the middle of the green. If you roll the cursor over position A in the middle of the fairway, you will find that you are roughly 260 yards from the tee and 100 yards from the middle of the green. Now drag the red dot halfway down the tee box and drag the yellow dot to the front of the green. Suddenly, you are 280 yards from the front of the green for a savings of 80 yards.
Add a stiff tailwind, and most experts are reaching for the driver. All that remains is to hit it over the fairway bunkers, the ditch, and finally, the apple tree. A normal tee shot leaves the approach shown below. This shot is downwind, usually off a downhill lie, and extremely likely to bound over the green. You might even find yourself interrupting play on the eleventh green.
The difficult approach to number five. Behind these magnificent bunkers, which appear to be greenside but are in fact twenty yards away, lurks the wildest green on the course.
The bunkering at Cape Arundel is powerful - strategically and aesthetically.The countours pour off this already narrow green every which way. This back pin is barely accessible with a twenty-foot putt - good luck with a nine iron.
Four putting is commonplace with this pin.
Very similar to the fifth - the tees are usually up, the wind is at your back, cutting the corner is an option for the long hitter, and the risk is absurd -
You have to negotiate this mess in order to drive the tenth green. Perhaps you would rather take your chances from the fairway. The back of this ingenious green complex drops off six feet, the left side is only slightly less severe, and you have already seen the right side. With approaches like this the notion of total yardage quickly become irrelevant. Finding the miniscule back shelf is as unlikely from 20 yards as it is from 120 yards.
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With approaches like this the notion of total yardage quickly become irrelevant. The left hand side of the fairway gives a preferable angle to the green, but a tee ball that is slightly pulled or hooked stands a chance of ending up in the river.
The Kennebunk River is in play on several holes. 
A view of the troublesome right hand side of the fourteenth green. Perhaps Cape Arundel's most notorious hole, the seventeenth is uneventful for the first 280 yards, at which point this fellow appears -
This bunker is eighty yards from the green. Just over the hill from that monstrosity lies the green, which has at least four feet of pitch from
front to back.
Unhittable, unputtable, unthinkable.