Visiting the Isle of Jura to see the new Ardfin course set me thinking about the sites on which golf courses are built nowadays. Back in the early 20th century, when golf was first spreading around the world, those who sought to create new golf courses generally hunted out sites that were naturally suited to golf, with gentle but interesting landforms and, ideally, free draining sandy soil.

Now, things are rather different. It’s true that, in the last twenty years, we have seen developers and architects hunting out great sites, almost without concern as to how remote they might be. Sand Hills, Barnbougle and Bandon work because the magnificent property enabled their architects to create world elite courses, courses good enough that people would travel for hours to get to.

Most golf, though, is not played at high-end remote destinations like these. Mostly, golf is akin to a retail business, with location and price utterly central to its success. That’s one reason that sites have got worse since the Golden Age; if location is key, nowadays there’s simply less choice.

Of course, remoteness itself can make a site difficult. At Ardfin, though Scotland is not huge and Jura hardly hundreds of miles from anywhere, the difficulty of accessing the site made getting construction machinery and materials to the property extremely hard work. When you’re operating far from civilisation – or perhaps more fairly, far from the mainstream golf industry – then you can expect a challenge.

Keith Haslam of construction management firm Braemar Golf says the Laucala Island project in Fiji, built on behalf of Red Bull founder Dietrich Mateschitz, is the toughest site he’s ever worked on. “Mateschitz wanted to develop the entire island as a retreat, and hired WATG to direct the project. We got involved through them, to assist with the golf,” he says. “Part of our remit was to look at different golf architects for them, so we did a beauty parade, and David Kidd got the job. To build it, they put together an in-house team, a model David is very comfortable with, but in reality they didn’t have much option – there aren’t any Fijian golf contractors. The island is tiny and in the middle of nowhere. Laucala has an airstrip now, and guests can either fly in on their own plane, or the resort will collect them at Nadi airport, the main one in Fiji and fly them in – it’s a fifty minute flight. But during construction, none of this existed – you flew to Nadi, to a nearby island and then took a six-person boat to get across to Laucala.”

Because of the remoteness, building the course at Laucala took some doing. “David and his team were literally designing on the fly,” says Haslam. “Chopping down trees and finding out what the ground was like as we went on. There was no decent topo information, so the build was about coming up with solutions to problems as we identified them. Materials like sand were brought in by boat from nearby islands, but the fairways were just built from whatever material could be found on the island itself.”

“I think the Ulaanbaatar Country Club in Mongolia was the hardest I have done,” says Kevin Ramsey of Golfplan, a designer who has spent his career globetrotting and building in new golfing markets. “It wasn’t just the site, although given the severity of their winters and the fact that we were essentially building on permafrost, that was difficult enough. When you are working in a country or a region where there is very little knowledge and experience of golf, you can expect the construction process to be slow and difficult, especially when the equipment available is not really fit for purpose. It’s for this reason that India, though in principle it should be a brilliant market for golf, is so difficult. There is good cultural fit, and there’s huge demand from the new middle classes for the sort of housing that can be developed alongside golf, but the thought process on project development is a struggle. There seems to be no understanding of good golf, with developers only interested in real estate appreciation. On top of that, land is extremely hard to find in large blocks and accumulating it is very cumbersome and time consuming. Then there is water – or lack thereof – and lack of adequate treatment facilities and pipelines. In new markets, you need a reliable and determined client above all else. We recently completed the Lake Victoria course in Uganda. It was five years, it was hard to get materials and machinery, and the papyrus swamp by the edge of the lake made construction very slow and difficult. I think the course has turned up great, despite the long haul, but that’s really down to the client’s determination.”

Mark Hollinger of JMP, another architect who has built all over the world, remembers one project in particular. “It would probably be a site I worked with in Guadalajara, Mexico,” he says. “The 18 hole project site was an abandoned rubbish dump with no usable soil, no usable vegetation, no water source, and no usable natural features – and to top it off, it had a highway running through the middle of it. We had to create everything. For example, we separated the organic material from the non-decomposed rubbish, hauled the remaining rubbish away, and mixed the organic with the existing silt along with imported sand to create soil. For water, we directed wastewater to the site from adjoining villages and constructed a state of the art water treatment system, and created irrigation effluent. Each variety of plant material, tree types, shrubs and ground covers used, and turf grasses used were selected to exist in the soil, water and climate which we had available to us. One by one, we dealt with each issue, now the place is a beautiful city parkland golf environment. This was creative landscape architecture on steroids. Dead flat is always challenging, because you must make the water move and deal with visual sight line challenges.”

The irony of this is that flat is hard, and so is steep. Brian Curley of Schmidt-Curley Design cites his much photographed Stone Forest course in Kunming, China, as the hardest he has worked on, because of the iconic rock formations through which the course is routed. The course was built next to a World Heritage Site, which, Curley says, made things tougher still. “I felt my role was just to provide a surface that weaved through the site, rather than construct a bunch of bunkers that said look at me,” he says, explaining that the design was, in some ways, more like a Golden Age process, in that the holes had to be found rather than created. “It was very difficult but essential to find holes that required the least amount of work,” he explains.

Most golf architects of today are familiar with, and at home with, substantial earthworks. The largest this writer has seen was at La Zagaleta, above Marbella in Spain, where architect Steve Marnoch had to terrace fairways into the mountainside to avoid the protected valley bottoms, and was thus left with a huge amount of material – which he used to create the practice range, a 42 metre fill. Large scale earthworks are not, in themselves, too daunting to most. But there are limits.

“I designed 36 hole and 27 hole courses in Taipei Formosa First Golf Club and Formosa Yangmei,” says longtime Palmer Design associate Harrison Minchew, now running his own practice. “Both courses had 10-30 metres of cut and fill along with extensive retaining walls 10-15 metres high. We filled valleys and place large dams with lakes on top of fills. No engineer in the US would have touched it. On those courses we moved in excess of 2.5 million cubic metres of earth. But even in the US you get sites that need huge amounts of work. At Balsam Mountain Preserve in Sylva, North Carolina, we had a very steep site with about a mile of 10-15 metre tall stacked stone retaining walls. In Taiwan the clubhouse sites were cut about 40 metres to create a flat spot!”

And then there is rock. Using explosives to build golf is not especially uncommon, but most architects try to avoid it like the plague. “When we were building the Legend at Giant’s Ridge in Minnesota, there were boulders everywhere,” says architect Jeff Brauer. “I called some New England architects to see how they dealt with it, and it was pretty much ‘avoid blasting, move the boulders out’. Luckily the contractor was adept at it, and did a nice job of removing the big ones, packing a mix of small ones in between, rolling heavy to compact, then plating with two feet of clay and six inches sand topsoil. I have graded out some in Asia on hilltops that are unbelievable. I did one as a ghost for a pro and was able to reduce cut and fill from 1.7 million cubic metres to 1.2 million. You reduce earthmoving by picking a key spot, and following the contours. Their problem was level fairways, whereas I graded to 5-7 per cent cross slope, saving a few metres of cut or fill. You have to be able to think in 3D. But the thing about those rocks at Giant’s Ridge was that there was subsurface water. You can still hear it running underground after opening. I spent all winter not sleeping well, thinking we would go back in spring only to see the sub-grade had a bunch of ‘gopher holes’ in it due to springs. Luckily, we didn’t, but I just wasn’t sure. After that, wet dirt becomes a challenge, but nothing like rock.”

“I think my new project at Georgenthal in Germany is the hardest I have worked on,” says German designer Christian Althaus. “Partly that’s because it’s steep and the soil is poor, but mainly because it is rather smaller than is ideal.”

So there are innumerable factors that can make a site difficult. But, as irrigation designer and construction specialist Don Mahaffey – a greenkeeper by training – says, in the end the most important issue is growing decent grass. “I suppose I look at severity differently than most who think of it as difficulty in sculpting or shaping,” he says. “I’m always looking at it as how difficult will it be to maintain good golf turf. With modern equipment and engineering we can build on the side of a mountain, but you can’t change the entire environment and make it favourable for good turf, no matter what the industry tells you.”

This article first appeared in Golf Course Architecture – Issue 43.