Photo: Evan Schiller The closing hole at The Keep plays from tees set among rock outcrops towards a green on the cliff edge When you first step onto The Keep, the new course at the McLemore Resort and community in northwest Georgia, it is impossible not to be struck by its incredible scale. That’s partly because you can view almost the entire course from any point. But more because beyond the course’s cliff edges, along which five holes play, there are 70-mile views from 1,000 feet above the valley floor of McLemore Cove. The vistas from the appropriately named Lookout Mountain had already been opened to McLemore’s golfers following the Bill Bergin-Rees Jones redesign of its first course, the Highlands, which was completed in 2019 and included the creation of an entirely new cliff-edge finishing hole. “The new eighteenth put us on the map,” says Duane Horton, president of Scenic Land Company, the developer of McLemore. “I will never forget the day Bill went over the edge of our upper plateau and disappeared into the thick woods and underbrush, only to pop up later with scratches from briars, soaked in sweat and the biggest smile, saying, ‘we are going to make it happen.’” For more than a decade Horton has been eyeing land to the south of the resort – with the idea of expanding McLemore’s residential community. The success of the Highlands redesign shifted his thinking to the creation of more golf. Horton says he was driven by the desire to create “an impossible combination of a links-inspired, mountaintop, cliffedge golf course.” Richard Humphreys reports on a new layout that is destined to catch the eye. Designed by Bill Bergin and Rees Jones, The Keep at McLemore occupies a spectacular setting on a mountaintop plateau. 61
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