I played the Castle last week and have been tracking the comments and opinions on the course with great interest--something that I'm sure will be a prime spectator sport for months to come. The thing that is fascinating to me is that I find myself agreeing in turn with both the boosters and the detractors--contrary to Tony Muldoon's gratuitous comment, there have been well-reasoned arguments on both sides. Those who haven't played it might think this is a simple thumbs up/thumbs down issue, as it is with most new courses, but in this case it's really not.
What's certain is that David Kidd hasn't produced a ho-hum golf course. This is an extreme design, as Scott Macpherson points out, a total blitz of dramatic moments and wild, over-the-top features. Some of these "special effects" work, others don't, but I applaud Kidd and his team for their audacity.
One of the points of contention has been the presence of what Tait called the "Don Kings"--the heavily grassed banks in the fairways. Some have been critical of his "splitting the fairway" comment, but the problem is that in places there really are so many of them (I thought of them as "buried Fiats", for their weirdly trapezoidal shaping) that it's more a matter of hit and hope than of cleverly selecting a line that might not be straight down the middle. Some of them are blind from the tee, and at times the overall effect is visually incoherent. The hard edges of the slopes and the heavy grasses lead as often as not to a lost ball--it's one thing to say the golfer "deserves" a clean lie when he has driven it 260 yards down the middle (he doesn't), but quite another to say he deserves the long walk back to the tee.
That said, I think the Castle Course easily passes the "fun and interesting" test, and I believe it will be a success for the Links Trust. It is such a different experience from everything else in St. Andrews, in a good way. My hope, however, is that David Kidd does not view the course as "finished" for quite some time. The Castle Course needs an edit. There are so many bold features that I have to think it would be impossible to really know how they will all function together until Bill from Harrisburg puts his peg in the ground. The routing is excellent, the basic ideas behind the holes are sound, and there's an adventurous spirit to the place that is really appealing. It's just a matter of identifying which elements truly add to the playing value of the golf hole and which are unnecessary nuisances. I'm sure that's easier said than done, and all too easy for an armchair observer like me to say, but I'd contend that it's probably a far better position to be in to tinker with a thrilling golf course than to hunt for ways to add excitement to something dull.
Finally, I'd encourage everyone on this board to take the opportunity to see or play the Castle. It isn't just the seventh course at St. Andrews, it's a significant statement in modern golf architecture. No matter where one ultimately falls on the spectrum of opinion, it is nothing if not thought-provoking.