The bottle hole would better be referred to as a “bottle-neck” hole - a narrowing of the landing area where the longer the drive, the narrower the target becomes. Mac/ Raynor accomplished this on a lot of different ways.
Macdonald’s great 8th at National (perhaps my favorite hole there) is different today than was his original intention. The original tee-box was left of the Road hole green not on the right where it is today.
Today’s hole plays with two strips of bunkering at a diagonal to the direct line from the present tee to the
green.
From the original intended the box, the tee shot would play as I described in the first paragraph.
Macdonald saw this narrowing feature in the second shot on the bottle hole at Sunningdale old. Paul Turner has an excellent graphic of this which he posted a while back. (The narrowing can also be accomplished with a diagonal).
Macdonald took the second-shot strategy and incorporated it into the tee-ball on National-#8 (thank you Charlie, you old fart!!). This is one of Macdonald’s composite holes at NGLA. I haven’t figured out what the other part of the composite is ..... he stated the following listing some of the holes he would incorporate into National - his Ideal Course.
#1: (not to be put in that particular order) ...370-yards - Similar to the bottle hole at Sunningdale, placing deep graduated bunkers in place of ditch and bunker the green properly ........ (Boy, did he ever)
They are going to clear the trees along the road (at NGLA) that are to the left of the present line of play. This does not necessarily mean they will reestablish the original tee - we’ll have to see what it will look like I guess.
Right now the length is 424 I think, but it was originally 368 as he indicated. The original tee at National was a few stride to the LEFT of the 7th green. I think he saw the hole was going to be too short - especially the tee-shot, negating his original “narrowing” intent so he did two things.
1.- he lengthened the hole by moving the tee to the present position (I’ve got about 7 different versions of NGLA scorecards but not all are dated - I should be able to tell when he moved the tee.
2. - but before he did that I think he added that Principal’s Nose bunker beyond the line of bunkers
because people were blowing over his hazard - he wouldn’t have none of that.
Raynor build bottle holes as did Banks but they are hard to uncover because clubs often covered in these bunkers ..... Imagine, bunkers in the middle of the fairway!!!!
So in essence it is a way of bisecting or segmenting a fairway - not even to have two options of play .....
It can (and was) just the narrowing of the drive zone ... but what is very cool is that the longer you hit the ball the narrower was (is) you landing area.
As an aside to that thought: If you look at many of their routings you often find that the longer hitter was often put at a disadvantage because, once beyond the prime landing area, they left you with a downhill lie, in essence, de-lofting your approach club, whereas the ”normal” good drive was on the more level part of the fairway. Not a lot of fun playing a wedge from a definitive downhill lie ..... You can see this strategy used on the 14th at National - go too far and you have a nasty short pitch - this was not an accident.
I made a drawing of Raynor’s original plan for the Olympic Club (1918) and there is a bottle hole on that plan that has many more bunkers than the 8th at National.
The fairway bunkering on the 8th at National in the late day sun is something to behold.
SS1 - does that help?