Royal St. George's Golf Club

Favorite Hole

No. 4, par 4, 493 yards

There’s no easy way to play this par 4-and-a-half. There are just slightly less difficult ways.

The view from the tee is frightening. A huge bunker cut into a tall dune blocks the entrance to the right half of the fairway. Left of the bunker and dune, an expanse of fairway is visible. If you play to this safe zone, however, you must stay short of a hidden, startlingly deep pot about 200 yards from the middle tee box, and you will be left with a long, uphill approach over broken ground and a green-side bunker.

In order to keep the hole from getting on top of you, therefore, you must take on the “Himalaya” hazard off the tee. On the other side of the dune, you will find a softly undulating fairway and a clear view of your target: a beautiful, imposing green that climbs up and over a natural shelf. Finding the high back tier, where the pin is almost always located, requires a mighty strike. Alternatively, a lower-swing-speed player might try a running shot that climbs the upslope and uses the feeding contours along the left and back edges.

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Overall Thoughts

Laidlaw Purves strikes me as an unlikely candidate to have built one of the world’s greatest golf courses. 

He adhered to a strict program of design that prioritized fairness above all else. The objective of a golf course, he believed, was to assess the ability to hit the ball “far and sure,” not to engage the player’s mind or, God forbid, to deliver joy. Hooks, slices, and tops were to be punished, and pure strikes rewarded — unfailingly. “Holes should be one or more drives in length,” Purves proclaimed in 1890, “so that any badly driven ball prevents the player reaching the green in the same number of strokes as the player who had driven well. Where the length cannot be obtained, any badly played tee shot should meet a hazard, which will have the same effect.” This does not sound like a recipe for a varied or pleasurable golf course.

So how did Royal St. George’s turn out to be one of the most varied, pleasurable courses in the world?

Well, first of all, it would have been difficult to build a bad course on this site. The landforms at Royal St. George’s are wonderfully varied, from the mountainous dunes that Nos. 2-6 play through, to the sine-wave-shaped undulations of the first, 17th, and 18th fairways, to the infantry rows of mounds crisscrossing the 12th and 13th holes. With each hole, the scale and shape of the ground shifts. The player can’t possibly grow bored or complacent.

But the appeal of the land at Royal St. George’s goes well beyond the measurables of topography. This course is dripping with genius loci. Bernard Darwin said it better than I could in 1910: “Sandwich has a charm that belongs to itself, and I frankly own myself under the spell. The long strip of turf on the way to the seventh hole, that stretches between the sandhills and the sea; a fine spring day, with the larks singing as they seem to sing nowhere else; the sun shining on the waters of Pegwell Bay and lighting up the white cliffs in the distance; this is as nearly my idea of Heaven as is to be attained on any earthly links.” In other words, once Purves clambered to the top of the tower at St. Clement’s Church and saw this dunescape, the most important part of his job was done.

Plenty of credit, too, should go to the members and advisers who edited the course between approximately 1908 and 1914. They broke up Purves’ repetitious cross hazards, scattering them into strategically sound arrangements of small bunkers. They also created today’s fifth hole, a thrilling par 4 where a manufactured gap in a dune ridge offers a view of the green to players in the ideal position in the fairway. (As part of the rerouting that made this hole possible, the club scuttled the original “Maiden” sixth hole, a par 3 vaulting over a massive sand dune. This was a small tragedy, perhaps, but a good trade.)

But it’s also clear that Laidlaw Purves himself did some first-rate design work at Royal St. George’s.

His routing is stellar. Defying the tradition of the out-and-back links layout, Royal St. George’s charts a complex, looping path through the dunes. The course generally moves counterclockwise, but it changes direction continually, tacking and weaving, doubling back, alternating between the exterior and interior of the site. Because of the intricacy of the routing, the size of the landforms, and the space between holes, the player becomes pleasantly lost. Each shot probes a new, previously unsuspected pocket of the property. 

Royal St. George’s has had this adventurous character from the beginning. While Nos. 3, 5, 6, 8, 11, and 16 have shifted from their initial footprints, the basic structure of Purves’s routing has remained intact since 1887.

Equally impressive is Purves’ knack for green siting and design. At many links courses established before the turn of the 20th century, the greens are relatively straightforward. This is not the case at Royal St. George’s. Purves’ original greens are undulating and natural, draped over wild, unpredictable spines and swales. The dune-top second, sharply tiered fourth, perched ninth, and expansive, rambling 13th are especially remarkable. Because of their lay-of-the-land randomness, these greens are hard to understand at first glance, but they reward study.

Laidlaw Purves may have been left behind by the “Golden Age” that started with the new century, but his work at Royal St. George’s has endured as one of the greatest achievements of British golf architecture. It’s time that he got his due.

3 Eggs

(How We Rate Courses)

Based on the strengths of its topography, routing, greens, and agronomy, Royal St. George’s is a clear three-Egg course. It does have a few faults: the par 3s, as a set, are a tad underwhelming (which is not surprising, given that all of them are non-original). In addition, several fairways would benefit from widening. Members must be deeply familiar with what Alister MacKenzie described as “the annoyance and irritation caused by the necessity of searching for lost balls.” In every other respect, however, Royal St. George’s is impeccable — a leading light of links golf and the Open rota.

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Additional Content

Bob Crosby on the History of Royal St. George’s (Fried Egg Golf podcast)

The Strange Beginnings of Royal St. George’s (Article)

The Simple Design Principles Behind No. 14 at Royal St. George’s (Article)

Tom Doak on Royal St. George’s (Article)