It's weird that the description I wrote just prior to the opening of the course is just now being published online. They sent it to me out of the blue a couple of weeks ago, to ask if I wanted to change anything; there was just one line that seemed off.
Peter, the lines on the map shown here just illustrated which areas were covered by vegetation [gorse] and which were open. Several of them DID follow the topo however, like the semicircle shape to the left of #13 green, which the line of the gorse also traces the base of the small hill that was [and still is] over there. So you've got a good imagination.
Interestingly, the only topo we had for Old Macdonald had a five-foot contour interval rather than two feet. It was good enough to show features like the plateau that's now the 2nd green, or the ridge that runs right of #7 fairway to #8 green; but there were lots of smaller features that didn't show up well on the map. Since we were looking for places to fit the various templates, we figured we didn't need to know some of the smaller details. We didn't find some of them until the gorse was cleared away, but we wound up leaving a lot of those small features in the ground unless they really clashed with the idea of the hole.
The process of designing and building Old Mac [with so many others involved, credited and not credited] was different enough from my other projects that I never really knew how to feel about it. I do think we avoided becoming trapped in the genre of a "replica" course and built something more special than that, but I don't quite take the same pride in it than I do in some of my more original designs ... Ballyneal and Rock Creek and Pacific Dunes all being very high on my personal list.