SPEY BAY 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 LinksDAO acquired Spey Bay in 2022 and appointed CDP, which would adopt a radical mindset to renovating the course 74 Photo: CDP
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