A new course with great variety
Our spectacular new golf course De Swinkelsche, an 18 holes course located in the sand belt of the south Netherlands, has been getting rave reviews in both the Dutch and International press since it opened in early 2013. De Swinkelsche is a course that is based on the classic principles of strategic design, with wide fairways dotted with rough edge bunkers, large areas of short mown grass around large undulating greens. It also is a course of an unusually high ambition level for the Dutch golf market.
This has been made possible by a number of important factors:
- First the course was built on a site of almost 250 acres and is enclosed on three sides by beautifull pine and oak forests
- Second the soil on which the course is built consists of pure sand combined with a low groundwater table.
- Third the course has five holes that have been carved out of existing forests, allowing us to use the exiting natural landforms and hardly do nay shaping.
- Fourth on the other holes there was the budget to move enough earth and do enough plantings to allow us recreate the old heathland landscape that occupied this location until early in the 20th century.
- Finally, the shape of the site allowed for an interesting, varied and very walkable routing, where the player constantly has the feeling of space and traquility.
De Swinkelsche has been doing very well since its opening, and this is reflected in the fact that the course has been scoring in the top 10 of the Netherlands on sites such as LeadingCourses.com
As discussed above, our initial work at Royal Hague involved the restoration of the greens. After our succesful completion of this restoration project, the club asked us to write a long term course plan to further optimise the important elements of the course such as the tees, paths, mowing lines, bunker construction, vegetation management and irrigation. The long term plan was presented to the mebership and after it was accepted the club has started working on inplementing the recommended steps during the last number of years.
The first step was to renovate all of the tees and many of the paths that connect greens and tees. Many of the tees were too large and too raised, making them fit in poorly with the existing dune landscape. We therefore made more sperated and smaller tees which belnded better in the ragged dunes of Royal Hague. In terms of the paths the key challenge was to make them safer and less steep in places, not an easy task in the sometimes quite extreme landforms that occupy Royal Hague. Other goals were to minimise the number of paths, hide them visually wherever that could be done and where possible contruct them of grass. In the last two years all the bunkers have been rebuilt using a liner called Bunkermat, to stop the continious wash-outs of the sand faces. Finally we have also rebuild the greensurrounds, the bunkers and the last 100 meters of hole 18, bringing it more in line with the other green complexes.
Fans of Royal Hague can be found in many places around the world. There is Ran Morrissett, the founder of GolfClubAtlas.com, the world's leading site on golf architecture, who after his visit to the course stated that for him Royal Hague is the best course on the Continent.
Word is out on the transformation that Royal Hague has gone through, largely under the direction of Dutch golf architect Frank Pont. Royal Hague gets my vote as continental Europe's best course. Personally speaking, I have yet to see fifty courses that I would rather play than here.
Another fan is Adam Lawrence, editor of the influential Golf Architecture Magazine, for whom Royal Hague ranks as the best golf course on the continent together with iconic Morfontaine.
Kennemer and Noordwijk are both terrific, but Royal Hague has better terrain and greens and more interesting golf. And now, after an extensive renovation led by Dutch architect Frank Pont, it is better than ever..... The new 17th green typifies Pont’s work at Royal Hague: he has taken a masterpiece, and given it a subtle, sympathetic facelift, and made it better still.
All this praise has also not gone unnoticed at the rankings of important magazines and websites such as Golf Magazine (USA), Golf World (UK) and top100golfcourses.com. Currently Royal Hague is after Morfontaine the highest ranked European course in Golf Magazine's World Top 100 at position 77.
Below are several links to articles and reviews about our work at Royal Hague:
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