Design Notebook: The Redan Bunker Is Back

Welcome to Design Notebook, where we measure LIV contracts not in dollars but in the number of Winter Park-style renovations they could fund. (Jon Rahm’s deal could pay for approximately 500 such projects, in case you were wondering.)

Today, we head over to Scotland to discuss the restoration of a famous bunker and the latest developments in the Coul Links saga.

Restoring the Redan

The par-3 15th hole at North Berwick Golf Club’s West Links is not quite the most famous golf hole in the world, but it’s probably the most influential. The Redan concept—involving a green that angles from right to left, giving players a choice between going straight at the pin, typically over a large bunker, and running the ball in from the right—has spread far and wide since its first implementation at North Berwick in the mid-1800s.

In recent years, however, the OG Redan has grown somewhat less gnarly and intimidating.

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This evolution is a microcosm of an overall trend at 19th-century links courses, where turf expansion and modern greenkeeping have had a domesticating influence. Sandy blowouts have morphed into revetted pots, natural whins have given way to manicured rough, and so on.

For the most part, links clubs have allowed these changes to unfold rather than counteracting them with naturalization or restoration efforts. Unlike top early-20th-century American country clubs, most seaside courses of the Old World don’t have access to massive funding for capital improvement projects. Plus, as architect Clyde Johnson told me earlier this year, golfers in Great Britain and Ireland generally don’t believe courses should be “fixed in one perfect moment in time.” “Golf courses are seen more as organic, living things—just a place to play the game,” Johnson said.

This is a wise attitude, to an extent, but there’s also room for vintage links courses to take a more historical approach to architectural stewardship. That’s why I was excited to hear last month that North Berwick, under the direction of course manager Kyle Cruickshank, had hired Clyde Johnson to carry out a simple but impactful restoration project: enlarging the Redan hole’s front bunker to its former size. Johnson is a talented young architect who has worked extensively with Tom Doak’s Renaissance Golf Design and is currently overseeing the construction of Doak’s new design at Cabot Highlands near Inverness, Scotland.

To gain some insight into his process and North Berwick’s thinking, I asked Johnson and Cruickshank to respond to a few questions via email. I’ve arranged their answers into a narrative below. -Garrett Morrison

Kyle Cruickshank: I was appointed in October 2022, and one of the first projects we had to undertake was the rebuilding of the long bunker on No. 17. Speaking to [consulting agronomist] Chris Haspell and [architect] Clyde Johnson about what we were planning, it was soon obvious it was too big a job for us to do in-house, and it was agreed they would come in to restore this bunker making it bigger, wider, reverting back to a revetted turf wall, etc. They did a great job and we used this as an example of some of the work we wanted to achieve going forward but also to get a “buy-in” from the members.

Our iconic 17th hole bunker … sensitively and respectfully restored back to how it once was. A wonderful team effort from industry leading professionals @manfescue and @CunninGolf, supporting our talented greenkeeping team led by @kylie_boy1903 #SuccessTogether | #WestLinks pic.twitter.com/sJqbPsSu5x

— North Berwick Golf Club (@NorthBerwick_GC) August 16, 2023

Clyde Johnson: Kyle Cruickshank and his team have started to make progress on de-shrinking the fairways and greens, but some of that work will have to wait on an updated irrigation system and increase in greenkeeping staff. The order of work has really been dictated by where Kyle has wanted to focus his renovation needs.

Kyle: Planning for 2023-24 winter works, I was looking at a drone photo [of the Redan 15th hole] that I took, and the bunker on the left of the green really annoyed me. The size of the bunker had shrunk over the years, and from the photo you’ll see that it didn’t look quite right.

Kyle Cruickshank's pre-restoration photo of the Redan hole

But it also sloped from left to right, pushing balls to the bottom of the turf face and making it tough to play out of.

Clyde: Revetted bunkers have a typical lifespan of three to five-plus years, depending on orientation to the wind and sun, the amount of play it sees, etc. The Redan bunker had shrunk significantly. The green-facing turf-wall had been built inside of the previous turf wall(s), losing its famed intimidating nature, with the face detached from the green edge and maintained as a semi-rough slope which could hold balls up from what should have been their inevitable fate. The outside edge had migrated inwards, too, with the floor now much smaller in size and sloping harshly to the base of the revetted wall.

Kyle: The 16th tee on top of the bank also didn’t feel like it tied in properly to its surrounds and blocked the view of the wall behind the green from the tee, which had been visible in earlier photos.

After their work on No. 17, we asked Chris and Clyde to undertake this project to bring the bunker back to its former state and to move the 16th tee further over to the left. Other than giving them a few objectives, I gave them the flexibility and creative license to build what they felt was right.

Clyde: Unsurprisingly there are quite a few historical photos of the Redan, but we were guided most by four or five photos, with the goal(s) of:

• Recapturing its original scale and height
• Recapturing the hard, tight edge and corners to the green
• Climbing the bunker floor to the face so that, while still intimidating and six feet deep, the bunker was a little more playable

(The infamous photo of Ben Sawyer playing when the bunker was shored up by railway sleepers offers a cool look, though it should be noted that, prior to that, the bunker was more naturally retained. Like most links bunkers, a century-plus of evolution has seen greenskeepers develop various iterations in their attempts to deal with wind erosion and golf traffic.)

Ben Sayers in the Redan bunker

Clyde Johnson, Chris Haspell, and their team set to work on the 15th hole at North Berwick in November 2023.

Clyde: I was responsible for demo-ing the old revet wall(s) and shaping the new bunker, while Chris Haspell (the club’s consulting agronomist, and architect and shaper in his own right) reshaped the 16th tee and green extension. Seeing two 13-ton excavators working on the Redan must have been some sight!

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Having set the outline and base, [shapers] Reece Haspell and Rory Paul, plus Scott Russell and Ryan Yuill from Kyle’s maintenance team, spent about five days building the revetted wall. As we reached the top, together we made slight tweaks to the artistry of the top revet line and tie-ins.

Kyle: Our team worked closely with Clyde and Chris but were mostly helping to transport soil away or turfing and tying in areas behind them. Over the course of a week, they worked away to get the finished wall we have now, before Clyde came in to do final grading and any other tweaks before signing off the project.

Clyde: What we’ve ended up with is pretty close to what was once there, though I decided to retain the native roll-over in the back-left corner rather than climb (and waste) revet and sand line high into the back-left corner, where it is out of sight from the tee.

The most satisfactory part of the work might have been lowering and shifting the 16th tee to the left a little, so that we could expand green back into the back-left, and see more of the wall from the 15th tee again.

Today, from the tee, the Redan bunker sits largely unsighted, though the player will now see a glimmer of sand flashing to the base of the newly visible revetted rear wall. Cresting the rise short of the green, the scale of the bunker is once again befitting of the hollow to the left of the green (and the greatest American replications). Though visually more intimidating, and with a near-vertical six-foot face, the broadened floor should prove more “playable.”

The restored Redan bunker, with a human providing a sense of scale

Kyle: The shape of the base will push balls back into the middle of the bunker to give golfers a better chance to play out instead of being pushed towards the bottom of the face and having a slope coming back into the bunker at the top of the bank. But despite what has been speculated, the main objective was not to make the bunker fairer. However, I feel that it is worth noting this to the membership to ease their concerns over increasing the size of the bunker.

The revetted wall will also be visible from the tee with a line of sand visible, too, without giving away the scale and danger of the bunker (think of the bunker left of the sixth green at Royal Melbourne’s West Course). The bunker will guard the green far better now and brings back the idea of the fortification of the green that the Redan was named after.

Birth of the Coul?

Elsewhere in Scotland, a group led by American investor Todd Warnock and Bandon Dunes founder Mike Keiser achieved a minor victory in a long-running effort to build a golf course at Coul Links, a protected swath of duneland just north of Dornoch. Last week, the Highland Council’s planning committee approved a new plan for the Coore & Crenshaw design. The matter will now be referred to the Scottish Government, which shot down a previous Coul Links application in 2020, saying that the “likely detriment to natural heritage is not outweighed by the socio-economic benefits of the proposal.”

Supporters of the golf development, who have organized into a group called Communities for Coul (C4C), believe they have addressed the government’s primary concerns. Their revised plan reduces the amount of the Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) that the course would affect and calls for mowing fairways from native grasses rather than seeding them. C4C further argues that their investment would not only boost the flagging local economy but also allow degraded features of the dune system to be restored.

“The SSSI is in a very poor condition,” Coul Links landowner Edward Abel-Smith told Golf Course Architecture. “The only way it will be properly preserved is through the income that would be generated by the golf course.”

The latest plan for the golf course at Coul Links

Opponents of the project—including an advocacy group called Not Coul, an array of environmental agencies, and members of the Scottish Green Party—warn that the course, even as envisioned in the new proposal, would do significant damage to animal and plant life on the links. They also question C4C’s claim that the development would generate 400 jobs, calling that number exaggerated.

Ariane Burgess, a member of the Scottish Parliament representing the Highlands and Islands region, announced that she would lobby government ministers to reject the plan. “Local residents value and cherish this special and unique landscape,” Burgess said, “and it’s deeply disappointing that the councilors on the panel opted to ignore those concerns as well as those raised by environmental groups on behalf of the voiceless wildlife that depends on this rare and precious habitat.”

So yes, C4C can celebrate getting their proposal past the Highlands Council, but they face an uphill battle in making golf at Coul Links a reality.

As much as the golf-nerd part of my brain is dying to see a Coore & Crenshaw design with unseeded fairways in real-deal Scottish dunes, I am not inclined to side with either C4C or Not Coul here. Both groups have strong arguments and represent important constituencies, and the conflicting imperatives of economic development and environmental conservation deserve equal voice. I want to see the process play out.

But I do have a few observations on this now eight-year-long fight:

1. Building links golf in the United Kingdom is unbelievably difficult and expensive, perhaps prohibitively so. Mike Keiser told Derek Duncan in 2020 that just moving a proposal through the application phase can cost up to $3 million. This means not only that future developers will be deterred from venturing into seaside dunes but also that, even if a new links course were to reach opening day, it likely wouldn’t be able to offer an affordable green fee.

2. The shadow of Trump International Golf Links looms large. Throughout the Coul Links fray, environmentalists have continually reminded the public of the former U.S. president’s controversial resort in Aberdeen, which “partially destroyed” an SSSI, according to NatureScot. The comparison has proven so problematic for the Coul Links development that Todd Warnock felt compelled to write an op-ed for The Scotsman proclaiming himself “dismayed and disgusted… by many of Trump’s pronouncements and actions.”

3. In the coming decades, the clashing interests of economic growth and environmental protection will define many efforts to build public-access golf. For instance, a proposed David McLay Kidd course on state park land in Washington State may create hundreds of jobs in the coastal city of Westport, but it will require years of complex negotiations with regulators. Such projects need to prove their economic bona fides while also delivering conspicuous ecological benefits. It’s a tricky balance but, with enough funding and savvy, an achievable one. Barely. -GM

Patting ourselves on the back

Over the past week, news spread in mainstream publications of an intriguing King-Collins project near Aiken, South Carolina. Readers of Design Notebook, however, will recall hearing about plans for 21 Golf Club in October. Sorry, couldn’t resist pointing that out. -GM

A course we photographed recently

Washington Golf and Country Club (Arlington, VA)—designed by William Flynn in 1918, restored by Renaissance Golf Design in 2020

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Quotable

“This science, for so it may now be fairly called, of the laying out of courses on carefully discussed and thought-out principles, is itself comparatively modern; the very expression ‘a good length hole,’ which is now upon all golfers’ lips, is of no great antiquity. Those who laid out the older links did not, one may hazard the opinion, think a vast deal about the good or bad length of their hole. They saw a plateau which nature had clearly intended for a green, and another plateau at some distance off which had the appearance of a tee, and there was the hole ready made for them; whether the distance from one plateau to another could be compassed in a drive and a pitch, did not, I fancy, greatly interest them. In some places nature, being in a particularly kindly mood, had disposed the plateaus at ideal distances, so that a St. Andrews sprang into being; but people as a rule took the holes as they found them, and were not forever searching for the perfect ‘test of golf.’ Gradually, however, the more thoughtful of golfers evolved definite theories as to what were the particular qualities that constituted a good or bad hole, and longed for an opportunity of putting their theories into practice. One such great opportunity came when it was discovered that heather would, if only enough money was spent on it, make admirable golfing country, and the architects have made the fullest use of it, lavishing upon the heather treasures of thought, care, and ingenuity which the non-golfer might say were worthy of a better cause.” –Bernard Darwin