Longish GCA thread here. Apologies.

On a pod a while back, @jeff_mingay and I talked about how one of the key skills in routing a golf course is identifying the best natural features on a given property and using them 1) many times and 2) many ways.  https://thefriedegg.com/school-of-golf-architecture-part-5-routing/

Lately I’ve been going through a bunch of @the_woke_yolk’s old photo sets (all drone shots here are his), and I realized that one particular course offers a really clear illustration of this routing principle: Shoreacres. Not a surprise to those who've played there, I’d guess.

When Raynor assessed the property, he must have realized that the best land was in the northwest section, with its crisscrossing ravines and fantastic natural topography. 

Look how many holes he packed in there, and how many different ways he used the watercourses.

But here’s what puts it over the top for me: the course visits this part of the property at two completely different moments in the round. It enters and exits the area four separate times (marked by arrows below), and the holes fit together like puzzle pieces.

In this way, Raynor was able to jam a bunch of golf holes into one paddock without having back-to-back parallel fairways or repetitious par sequences. Also, he figured out how to let golfers to visit the coolest land on the property on both the front and the back nine.

Routing can be a tricky concept to understand. To me, Shoreacres provides a fairly simple example of what a good routing can do. /thread