Elevated Greens

[Padraig Dooley]

I played a couple of rounds on a course during the week. Not one of the greens were flush with the fairway, all were above the level of the fairway. The course markets itself as an inland links, but with the raised greens the ground game is almost obsolete.

The raised greens also seem to create a bigger gap between better players and average players. What is the main purpose of the elevated greens?

Was it Trent Jones who popularised them? They have been around forever, did he bring them more to the fore?

Why would someone have all greens elevated?

[Tom_Doak]

Padraig:

Elevated greens are a function of building courses on poor soils, where it's more efficient to bring in fill for the greens than to try and screen the soil sufficiently.  So, you don't find them on the heathland courses much, but you find them on other golden age courses such as Winged Foot.

However, some good-player architects also rationalized elevated greens on the belief that they "reward a good shot", by penalizing everyone who misses the green -- so they multiplied beyond their functional rationale.

Trent Jones certainly did not invent elevated greens, but by trying to set a style of his own that could be adapted to any site worldwide, it was a logical choice.

[cary lichtenstein]

Try plaing 9 and 18 at Spyglass Hill. Missing those greens and getting up and down, really difficult

[Niall C]

Padraig

Just to add to what Tom D was saying about the practical reason behind them, in the early days you also had plateau greens like the Pandy hole at Musselburgh. Bernard Darwin was a great fan of these type of holes but they went out of fashion somewhat and places like Monifieth were redesigned and a lot of the plateau type greens rebuilt.

Niall

[BCrosby]

Tom -

Are you really suggesting that elevated greens are solely a by-product of bad soil? I can think of any number of good architectural reasons to build elevated greens from time to time, even in ideal soil.

Bob 

[Sean_A]

Colt and Ross were prolific designers of plateau/knob greens.  I think Colt did it because he liked the style in that shots were more visible and it would have helped with grade drianage.  Ross probably liked the style, but on many of the courses of his I have seen drainage would have been a huge plus for doing it.  To me, Colt is really the first architect to systematically build elevated greens thus helping to to drastically reduce the popularity of punch bowl, front to back greens and straight up grade level greens.  In other words, Colt's work really is the direct lineage of modern design only he did it better than nearly everybody else.

Ciao 

[Dónal Ó Ceallaigh]

I played a couple of rounds on a course during the week. Not one of the greens were flush with the fairway, all were above the level of the fairway. The course markets itself as an inland links, but with the raised greens the ground game is almost obsolete.

The raised greens also seem to create a bigger gap between better players and average players. What is the main purpose of the elevated greens?

Was it Trent Jones who popularised them? They have been around forever, did he bring them more to the fore?

Why would someone have all greens elevated?

Padraig,

I presume the course you are referring to isn't that old.

I would say it's all down to drainage. I've seen few courses recently that were all built in the last 10 years and I don't recall seeing any greens flush with the fairways. I wonder if the architects just don't want to take any chances when it comes to green drainage.

[Padraig Dooley]

I played a couple of rounds on a course during the week. Not one of the greens were flush with the fairway, all were above the level of the fairway. The course markets itself as an inland links, but with the raised greens the ground game is almost obsolete.

The raised greens also seem to create a bigger gap between better players and average players. What is the main purpose of the elevated greens?

Was it Trent Jones who popularised them? They have been around forever, did he bring them more to the fore?

Why would someone have all greens elevated?

Padraig,

I presume the course you are referring to isn't that old.

I would say it's all down to drainage. I've seen few courses recently that were all built in the last 10 years and I don't recall seeing any greens flush with the fairways. I wonder if the architects just don't want to take any chances when it comes to green drainage.

Yes Donal, the course is only a few years old.

It seems very strange to render the ground game obsolete, it's mainly shorter hitters who use it. The lack of it might antagonise them so much that they would choose not to play the course anymore.

[Tony Ristola]

Funny, I see this somewhat the opposite.

If you're on poor soils, you're going to be installing drainage, so it's "safer" to have the greens running closer to original grade so long as you have some slope for surface drainage to move water away from the greensite. If you're building sand based greens without drainage, or with tile at the lows/exit points (depending on the depth of the water table and the percolation rate of the "sand"), and require 3-feet of sand to ensure drainage, I'll tend to bump them up a bit just to be safe.