Golf has a reputation of being a game stuck in the past, and largely played by older people.

Although there is some truth to this stereotype (stereotypes tend to be based on at least partial truth, which is how they emerge), there has been a pretty significant change in the last few years, with the post-Covid golf boom seeing the emergence of a new generation of golfers.

In early 2022, the New York-based LinksDAO (decentralised autonomous organisation) raised $11 million in a little more than 24 hours by selling NFTs (non-fungible tokens). With the proceeds, the leaders of LinksDAO set out to buy a golf course, which their members, the people who bought the NFTs, would be able to join. After a search, they settled on Spey Bay, a links dating from 1907, originally designed by Ben Sayers, an hour east of Inverness (and an hour and a half north and west of Aberdeen) in the Scottish Highlands.

Spey Bay has a lot of history. Ramsey Macdonald, the first Labour prime minister of the UK, who was born in nearby Lossiemouth, was a member for many years. But the course had fallen on hard times. Maintained by one part-time greenkeeper, it had become choked with gorse. Gorse, when in bloom, is unarguably attractive, but it is a savage plant; a ball in a gorse bush is unequivocally lost; and it spreads rapidly. As part of the landscape texture of a golf course, particularly a links, it can be tolerated; once it dominates, the course is rapidly on the way to being overrun. In this era of large fairway width being the done thing, Spey Bay was the height of anti-fashion, with super-narrow bowling alleys separated by huge fields of gorse.

LinksDAO acquired Spey Bay last year. It was obvious to all concerned that the place would need substantial investment both on and off course: as well as the gorse issues and everything else that comes with a lack of maintenance over many years, the clubhouse is simply not adequate for a place with aspirations to be anything more than a cheap game for locals. The new owners hired Bert Mackay, a Scot who, for the last ten years, had run Castlerock Golf Club, only a few miles from Royal Portrush in Northern Ireland. Mackay is no stranger to extensive course works, having overseen a substantial renovation by Martin Hawtree at Castlerock, but the plans at Spey Bay are significantly larger.

The new owners also hired some heavy-hitting architectural support, in the form of the three-headed transcontinental design firm Clayton DeVries and Pont (CDP). Naturally, the change from a small, undermaintained course for locals (Spey Bay is five miles from the tiny town, a village really, of Fochabers) to one with a global membership of thousands, required a fair amount of design thought, and Sam Cooper of CDP, after he visited the site, came up with a fairly radical idea: make the course reversible. Partner Frank Pont has some form in this regard; a few years ago he built the highly- regarded reversible nine hole Links Valley course in the Netherlands, and had an idea to build similar courses in cities anywhere, as a way of bringing golf back into large urban environments.

It is not hard to see the attraction of this idea. If members are largely going to be travelling several thousand miles to visit Spey Bay, being able to alternate the direction in which the course is played from day to day, and thus give them two different layouts occupying the same piece of ground and keeping them on the property has obvious appeal. But if creating a new reversible layout is tricky, trying to produce two sensible, playable and good routings on an existing one is massively challenging, something akin to a 3D jigsaw puzzle occupying more than a hundred acres. It is a monumental job, though, I guess, made very slightly easier given that Spey Bay’s current routing is essentially out and back – only a couple of holes, the eighth and fifteenth, both par threes, presently play in a direction that is not parallel to the coast.

That said, Spey does have quite a bit going for it. The course’s site is dominated by gravel ridges that also run parallel to the sea; most of the holes occupy the low ground between these ridges. The reconstruction will see a number of gaps cut into these ridges to enable holes to play in a less parallel fashion. In front of the newly-established maintenance building, in what used to be the driving range, the team has excavated a huge hole to extract sand and gravel. If a more rapacious developer had bought the club and managed to secure a permit to do so (which would most probably, and thankfully, have been impossible), quite a lot of money could have been made by selling these materials. What the gravel does, though, is ensure, even by links course standards, quite phenomenal drainage. Water just hits the course and goes straight through – Mackay told me, during my visit, that the club had just hired an extra person on the greens crew whose job would essentially be watering – all day every day.

Spey’s greatest attribute, though, is its ground contour. I have genuinely never seen a golf course with so much micro contour in the fairways – to the extent that, Mackay told me, mowing the golf course takes a hugely long time, because the machines have to move so slowly. It reminded me in places of some of the most famous old links that do not have big dunes and are essentially about small-scale ground contour, most obviously and famously St Andrews. No course that brings the Home of Golf to mind can easily be dismissed. A lot of new tees, and several new greens, will need to be built to bring the reversible courses to fruition, but the site has great potential.

CDP partner Frank Pont says: “When changing an existing course into a reversible one, the main challenge is to ensure that the existing greens have shapes that allow for play from two directions, and that their locations work for a dual layout. When either of these conditions are not met, new green complexes have to be built, something which we try to avoid due to the additional cost and disruption. Again to mitigate costs and also for maintenance reasons, a secondary issue is the need to ensure that as many tees as possible can handle play in both directions. Ideally, the angle between the two different playing lines into greens should be between 90 and 180 degrees.

“Spey Bay is an excellent candidate for ‘reversing’ as many of its green complexes offer compelling play from two directions. When finished, the two versions of the course will be noticeably different but equally fun to play.”

A substantial hotel, the Richmond Gordon, used to stand next to Spey Bay’s eighteenth green: it burned down in the 1960s. But the purchase of the golf course came with a lot of additional land in the form of woods to the interior: it is likely that woodland lodges will be built in here to accommodate visiting members. The transformation of Spey Bay is in its early stages. I do not yet know how well it will work out – there is plenty of potential for things to go wrong. But watching it develop will be exciting and I look forward to returning to see what is done.

This article first appeared in the July 2024 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.