Ten years ago Gowrie Farm in the KZN Midlands was rated by Golf Digest USA as being among the very best “Short Courses” in the world outside the United States. A tremendous accolade for this unique hybrid layout with 12 greens and a new take on what you can do to zhush up a 9-hole layout and imbue it with style and character.
The designer was Guy Smith, and Gowrie Farm was his first foray into the art of golf course architecture, although he was involved with the development of Prince’s Grant on the KZN North Coast. He built it on a low budget, using push-up greens. Now he’s taken Gowrie into a different realm of being an 18-hole course where he goes up against the big boys in the Top 100 rankings. As a hybrid Gowrie was good enough to feature as high as No 48.
Having extra capacity for bigger fields will make it a prime destination at Nottingham Road in a beautiful farmland region as it offers magnificent 5-star lodging upstairs in the clubhouse and behind the 18th green.
Smith is a lover of old-fashioned golf course architecture, an amateur comparable to men a century ago who built such masterpieces as Pine Valley, Pebble Beach and National Golf Links of America. He grasps ideas for holes from visits to Scotland’s great links and he’s brave enough to recreate them in this country where his kind of penal bunkering and sloping greens is not universally admired.
Now that it has 18 holes (opened to the public on March 13), Gowrie may have more bunkers than any other course in South Africa. The count is around 160, and they lurk everywhere. One of the new holes is appropriately called Sahara. But these are not just bunkers. They sprout grass and reeds too. And the texture of the sand varies, as does the depth and steep faces. As they say about the Old Course at St Andrews, if you can avoid going into a bunker for 18 holes you’ve played exceptionally. The same rule applies at Gowrie Farm.
Gowrie was a successful “9-holer” for 17 years, but it was always Smith’s ambition to explore further possibilities, as long as any new holes would complement the existing ones into a seamless 18-holer. And he has done that magnificently, even though golfers who play for the first time at Gowrie this year will immediately detect where the old end and the new begin. Essentially that’s after the second hole, a long par 3 over a wetland that is one of the jewels in the crown of this layout.
The new holes, from No 3 to No 9, even with their superb greens complexes, are still rough and ready to the eye as the fairway grasses knit and the mounding takes shape and blends in with the surroundings. There’s some unsightly long kikuyu grass bordering fairways which you don’t see on the old section of the course. When they take on a more natural links look they will be spectacular.
Smith has been bold and inventive with his new holes, making a statement of intent on each. He’s an admirer of Charles Blair Macdonald, known as the grandfather of American golf who replicated design features from the greatest holes in the British Isles on his courses, notably the National Golf Links. CB Macdonald identified what he termed “template holes” that would test a player’s game. He didn’t duplicate what he had seen in the British Isles, but designed his own variations with a unique twist.
As an example, at Gowrie Farm the par-4 third is a “template” of the Road Hole on the Old Course. You would not make that assumption standing on the tee, but a closer appraisal is revealing. Instead of the high railway sheds alongside the Old Course Hotel over which to drive the ball, he has used a deep hollow and a wide fairway bunker that a player has to carry for the tiger line from tee to green. There is ample fairway left for the shorter hitter, but that leaves a longer approach to a narrow green sandwiched between a pot bunker and an attractive rockwall buttressing the tee for No 4.
Another “template” is of the Postage Stamp green at Royal Troon. But it’s used on a short 4 (No 9) rather than a short 3. The raised green, bordered by bunkers, is near identical in size, but in square metres instead of yards. It’s a hole many will attempt to drive, and will require a fortunate bounce for the ball to run on to the green.
Smith’s favourite hole, though, is the par-4 fifth, where he gathered hundreds of big rocks from the veld to form a low long wall flanking the left side of the fairway which curves right at the end to enclose the right edge of the green from the fairway. It’s a “template” of a hole at North Berwick’s West Links called the “Pit” and the best angle of approach is from as close to the wall as possible
The par-3 sixth at Gowrie, played uphill over a narrow ravine, has a Redan-style green, and the green at No 8, a sharp dogleg left par 4, is modelled on the 18th at Muirfield.
A new halfway house has been built alongside the ninth green in the middle of the course, making this an out-and-back layout where you don’t return to the clubhouse, and the second nine has a combination of three 5s, three 4s and three 3s. The par is 71 due to there being five 3s.
No 10, a par 5, uses the fairway and green of what used to be the old No 2 & 12, but additional bunkers have been added on the right, opposite those on the left. As if the bunkers are not enough of an obstacle, there now stand stumps of “Ou Hout” between them. These quickly grow into small trees with dense crowns. A South African version of Scotland’s gorse bushes?
Gowrie Farm has one dilemma still to solve in its changeover, and that’s the finishing hole. There used to be separate tees and greens using the same fairway for No 9 (short par 4) and No 18 (par 5). The lower tee boxes for No 9 are handily situated at the back of the par-3 17th green, and 18 can be played as a par 5 from those. Yet the elevated high tees are more impressive and demanding. The issue is that to reach them you have to walk nearly 150 metres back up a steep hill. Fine if you have a golf cart, but tiring at the end of a long round. Both sets of tees should be retained, and a compromise arrived at.
