Open ditches and earth walls in GCA

[Jon Wiggett]

I have just been pulling a few drainage ditches to help alleviate the wet conditions on certain parts of the course. It struck me whilst doing this, that although many of the older courses that I played growing up had ditches and earth walls crossing the playing corridors very few new courses had these features.

A good example local to me would be Grantown on Spey which has earth walls and open ditches interacting with play on many of the holes
If placed correctly I find that they can add as much interest to a course as stream, bunker or lake.

Why are they not used more and what good examples do you know

Jon

[Mark_Rowlinson]

One problem with ditches on some courses around here (Alderley Edge [ca 1910] and Mobbrley [new]) is that the grass adjacent to the ditch is not mown short and you can't see whether your ball has entered the hazard or is lost in the grass. You don't have to be able to find the ball in a water hazard but you have to be certain that it has gone in. I've no objection to ditches in principle, the burn cutting across the 16th at Royal Troon being really nothing more than a ditch.

Stone walls are OK on old courses if they are in the right place - North Berwick, for instance. I suppose if an earthwork is older than the course then it may as well be incorporated into the course. There are gaps in earthworks that you must penetrate on the New Course and, if I remember correctly, at Littlestone. Both are fun.

[Mark Pearce]

There are walls and earth works in play on several holes on Hanse's Craighead course at Crail and which are crossed on a number of holes.  There's a wall in play on the 8th at Renaissance, as there is next door on the 6th at Muirfield. 

The Berkshire has drainage ditches in play on a couple of holes on the Red course, crossing them on at least 1 and 14.  I like them as a feature.

[Tyler Kearns]

Oakmont is well-known for the open ditches that run parallel to many of its fairways, serving to both remove water from the playing surfaces and acting as a punishing hazard.

TK

[Niall C]

Jon

The finest example I know of in using stone walls in a design is the Eden. Colt punched gaps in the walls for the fairway and then heaped soil around and over the bits of the wall immediately to the side of the fairway while leaving the wall in off play areas alone. It wasn't apparently obvious to me what he'd done first time playing the course but it certainly adds some great interest.

As for ditches, I'll remind you of the old old story about the golfer hitting his ball over the "bonnie wee burn" one time while the next he was hitting his ball into "the filthy sewer". So I suppose whether an open water channel is burn or a drainage channel comes down to your perspective.

Niall

[Jaeger Kovich]

The only modern course I can think of off the top of my head that has a few open ditches as have been described is DMK's Queenwood in Surrey, England.

I'm sure the advancements in drainage technology have helped eliminated this sort of feature, but there is probably more to it than that. Maybe part of the reason is that in places where some of these open ditches might have gone in the past, our better modern architects have figured out how to blend them in with the other contours and incorporate them with the rest of the hole so they meld better with everything.

[Dónal Ó Ceallaigh]

Here's an example of an earth wall or bank (the term I'm most familiar with) at the 15th hole on the old Rosapenna course on the Coastguard side. The green site is located in a small rectangular field of about 1.4 acres, that was bordered on four sides by earth banks. The banks have been eroded with time, but the boundary ridge that crossed the fairway about 70 yds before the green is quite clear in the pictures below.




1902 Ordnance Survey map. The green is located in the small rectangle just above the Coastguard Station.



1995 Ordnance Survey aerial.



The approach to the green. The hole is 419 yds, and as well as requiring an uphill blind drive, it usually plays into a headwind. The boundary bank comes into play for the second shots landing short.



The centre of the fairway.



Bunker dug into the boundary wall on left side of fairway.

A similar hole playing towards this green location existed in the layouts of Brown/OTM (1893-95), Vardon (1906) and Colt (1911-1913), so they all made use of this man made feature. Clearly, some work was done at some stage to level portions of the bank, but I cannot say who was first responsible for this. The bunker dug into the bank is similar in style to the other bunkers dotted about the course; Colt being the last architect to work on these old holes that no longer are part of the OTM course.



Some rocks that would have been used to build up the original boundary bank have now become visible in the bunker.





Looking back down the fairway. The other boundary line is visible in the left centre of this photograph and ran at right angles to the line crossing the fairway.

[Tony_Muldoon]

Great stuff Donal.

All over the heathlands you see the remnants of this kind of work, Swinley to Walton Heath.   I suspect a no of ditches were dug also creating mounds and then their appearance were softened over time.  Does someone have photos of the work on the second at Swinley?  Pretty rudimentary with straight lines remaining  in places.

[Jon Wiggett]

Some good replies gents.

Nice pictures Donal. John Chilver-Stainer GCA and regular poster on here built an 18 hole layout in Valais, Switzerland where the old irrigation canals for the fields were protected and had to be left. They were a prominent and interesting feature of the course.

Niall,

yes, I know the story well but this does not stop many a course wanting to have a water feature especially a lake/cesspit . I am just surprised that ditches, earth wall and the like are not used more often.

Jon