"I have always had a disconnect between my personal definition of what I consider camouflage, and how it doesn't relate with Mackenzies bunkering on some of his more reputed creations."
Paul:
That feeling seems to be pretty common.
I think the reason for it is many misunderstand what Mackenzie was trying to do in golf architecture by applying some of the techniques of Boer trench camouflage to architecture, particularly bunkering.
For some reason many think Mackenzie was trying to make his sand bunkering invisible to the golfer. He never really did anything of the kind, quite the opposite in fact. Some of his bunkering done in America (which was done after Darwin wrote that article above) was highly visible, almost glaringly visible, in fact.
The camouflage principle he picked up from Boer trenches and applied to golf architecture was simply that he attempted to make his bunkers look like they were not man-made at all, like they pre-existed the golf course in many cases.
Obviously to do that well he had to develop a construction technique of "tying in" or "tying out" the lines of his bunkers into existing grades or grades that looked like existing grades so that they looked like they weren't man-made at all.
This is what the Boers did with the military trenches they manned in the Boer War. They did that obviously so the British could not even recognize that they existed and consequently didn't fire in that direction.
I think Mackenzie took this Boer camouflage technique a step farther because he also observed that the Boer's constructed "dumby" trenches that looked like the British highly artificial and man-made looking trenches.
They did that obviously to draw British fire at those unmanned artificial man-made looking trenches and away from the camouflaged trenches they were in.
So how did Mackenzie use that latter part in his golf course architecture?
I think he did it by also using bunkers in places that may've been functionally or strategically irrelevent or at the very least not very important in that they did not exactly conform strategically to some standardized strategic risk/reward equation that the golfer had come to expect from bunkering.
Could this be considered a form of strategic trickery in golf architecture?
Of course it could. I can't see how there could be any doubt about it. He certainly did notice that the Boer's very much tricked the British military in their over-all trench methods and he probably felt the same was appropriate with strategic arrangements in golf course architecture, particularly with bunkering.
But then what happened with golfers' expectations? I guess one could say just more of the same.
Apparently they came to not only expect that wherever a bunker was placed was the place to challenge for the best reward on the following shots but also that if a bunker was strategically of low importance or irrelevent it was useless and shouldn't be there.
Many of those old clever architects even wrote things like "no bunker is misplaced" but apparently golfers weren't paying attention to that or were unwilling to listen.
They even came to call sand bunkers "sentinels" or "lighthouses" that protected ideal lines to holes.
Eventually this hugely prevalent expectation amongst golfers that any and all bunkers should have strategic risk/reward relevence evolved into the idea that bunkers with low risk/reward relevence were "eye candy"----eg if a bunker was in some place where golfers never really got in it, it was therefore useless and irrelevent.
So in a way, and in my opinion, both the Boers and Alister Mackenzie in his use of their military trench camouflage techniques have completely "kept the con", if you get my drift.
Apparently the Boers recognized the stupidity of the one dimensional expectation of the British military and apparently Mackenzie recognized the one dimensional expectation of golfers, and both of them used the same basic principle in military trench warfare and in golf course architecture.
This is a form of camouflage. In this way Mackenzie could actually camouflage, to some extent, the existing strategies of his holes.
I'm quite sure his intention was to force golfers to use their own observational skills better, to use their experience and intelligence more. To better engage with the more natural presentation of the architecture or course.
There really is a connection, in a strategic sense, to TOC simply because much of the arrangement of that course with its natural sand and topographical features pre-existed golf and architecture altogether. In other words, God or Mother Nature with the arrangement of that land had not exactly contemplated its use by golfers with some scientific expectation of hazard or feature arrangements!
There's one last element of Mackenzie's "camouflaged" bunkering that he certainly became aware of even with the observations of golfers.
And that was, as highly visible as they were as the golfer played his holes, if the golfer turned around at the end of the hole and looked back, those bunkers really were mysteriously invisible from that vantage.
The reason for that was that he "tied in" or tied out" their surrounds into existing grades so well that they weren't noticeable.