Golf Course Architecture - Issue 61, July 2020

71 can bet he would have put a par three there, making the ravine a diagonal hazard to a green. Abercromby didn’t do that. Colt also tended to alternate par threes between even and uneven numbers for match play foursomes. With Abercromby it’s all uneven. “It looks like Abercromby did more of the routing and Colt maybe came in and said ‘let’s do the mounding a bit different around the greens’, ‘let’s put the bunker here’. And that’s kind of what we know about how Abercromby worked with Willie Park Jr at Worplesdon.” With the team having made great strides in unpicking the history of the course, which originally started at today’s fifth hole, they are forming a plan to return it to its former glory. “It’s almost like a Rembrandt found in an attic,” says Pont. “You need to take four layers of varnish off, just clean it up and bring back what’s there. But the whole painting is still there. “In some sense, the analysis wasn’t that hard here. Once we had the data it was clear that very little had happened to the basic elements of the course – greens, bunkers, playing lines. Corridors have narrowed significantly because of tree growth. You see that everywhere in the UK. They had lost a lot of heather and gained a lot of trees. That’s what I would call entropy; over time the trees kept growing and they didn’t notice, then all of a sudden, you’re tree-logged. “From a process point of view, though, the difficult part is telling the membership ‘by the way, this picture I just showed you, that’s what we’re going to do’. Everyone’s going to say ‘what?!’ But as Colt said, ‘trees should serve perhaps as scenery but never part of the stage’.” Clayton explains the relatively recent phenomenon of restoration. “No-one in the 50s was talking about restoring As well as revealing how open the course previously was, this 1947 aerial image from the Royal Air Force has enough detail for the CDP team to be able to gain precise information about green sizes and bunker placement Photo: courtesy of Clayton, DeVries & Pont