Is it just about raking them or could golfers do more to help greenkeepers keep a course’s bunkers in the best possible shape?
For Your Course, produced by the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association, we spoke to three course managers from across the UK to understand how they maintain, develop and pay for their bunkers.
This week, we’re asking how their bunkers are put together and what golfers can do to make the job of maintaining these labour-intensive hazards a bit easier.
Tackling those questions are Simon Bell-Tye, course manager at Skylark Country Club in Hampshire; Kerr Rowan, who leads the greenkeeping team at Kilmarnock (Barassie), in Ayrshire; and Graeme Roberts, course manager at Hayling, in Hampshire.
What’s the one thing golfers could do to make your lives easier when it comes to bunkers?
Graeme: It’s where they walk in and out of the bunkers. We find a lot of damage is based on them taking alternative routes and that can create quite significant damage over time. But I’d say the biggest thing would just be leaving them how they found them. If they understood how they would want the bunker to be if they found their ball in it and they left it the same way, that would make life a lot easier for everyone.
Simon: The first would be just to rake them. But the way to rake them, in layman’s terms, is push and don’t pull. If everyone pulls the sand, they just pull it out to the back and that’s when you get all the sand at the back of the bunker.
Members go in, hit their shot, grab the rake and just drag the sand from the green side of the bunker towards the back. They’ll rake and then drop and you get these ridges. But if you just brush the sand towards the pin, you’ll get a lot fewer ridges or waves in the bunker and the sand will rake pretty much smoothly.
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Kerr: This maybe slightly silly but the best thing they could do is use two hands to rake a bunker. I see golfers all the time one-handed raking a bunker, and none of the greenkeepers I know do it. If they just use two hands and take a tiny bit of time, then the bunkers will be so much better. If they’re raking one-handed, they’re shifting a lot of sand backwards.
If they’re in a bunker, they’re probably not that happy about it because they know it’s a hazard and it’s not where you’re meant to be. But if they can just shake that off, take a bit of time and use two hands, we’d be in a better place.
How are your bunkers constructed? Are they natural or revetted?
Kerr: When I started, every single bunker was revetted. A revetted bunker lasts roughly five years depending on if it’s facing the sun and how much it’s been played. We’d need to do 25 bunkers a year to maintain the status quo. I think we’d done three in the three winters prior to me [arriving]. It’s a monumental ask with the turf nursery, the amount of people and the amount of golf we have.
This winter, we decided to naturalise some of our fairway bunkers, and we’ve done that on the 1st, 2nd and 3rd on the main course. There were a few reasons. They were in the wrong place, and we wanted to move them for modern-day golf. They were revetted and pot so they were really quite penal.
And because a revetted bunker only last five years, we just didn’t have the resources to do the course justice. With a naturalised bunker, we’re hopeful that it’s a bit gnarly and straggly and we only have to redo it every 10-to-15 years, so that will give us the time to concentrate on the revetted greenside bunkers.
Simon: When I came here, the bunkers were just scoops out of the ground with some sand in them. They looked awful, and the owner at the time really wanted to improve the bunkers. I’m a member at Royal Winchester and they had used [artificial] EcoBunker. He really liked the look of them, and we built two on our 11th. They were the worst two bunkers on the course, and they really popped.
What’s lovely about them is we line them and then build the wall on top of the liner. You build a shelf and then build up in a brickwork fashion. You’ve got a nice artificial wall with a liner, and then I use an artificial strip batten that’s screwed to the top of the last revet and is backfilled with soil to the top of the batten.
My maintenance is just raking bunkers. I can run a mower pretty much all the way around them. I use a strimmer three or four times a year and edge them up to stop any lateral growth.
The maintenance of edging my bunkers is minimal. Sometimes, at the beginning of the season, where you get a bit of moss over the winter, we spray them off with some iron and then brush or string the faces. That’s pretty much all I do with them.
Graeme: The site is based predominantly on shingle, so if you go to below two inches on some of our fairways, you are through the soil and it’s straight shingle. The issue we face is stone migrating up into the bunker sand.
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The worst nightmare for us would be stones in the bunkers because that becomes a colossal maintenance issue to clear that stone out of it. All bunkers on our site are built with a fibre geotextile liner. All we’re looking for is something that separates the natural profile of the soil from the bunker sand on top.
It’s purely just a physical barrier to stop that but still allows rainwater and irrigation water to drain through. Our bunkers are all built naturally. They’re predominantly revetted bunkers around the greens and, as part of a sustainability push for us, the majority of our fairway bunkers – or those situated a bit further away from the greens – are hybrids.
There is a more natural rough grass edge, and they might also have flares and essences of revetted bunkers to create a bit more interest. But from a resource point of view, the actual construction of the bunker is a lot less costly for us.
With a lot of revetted bunkers, particularly where we are on the south coast with a lot more dry periods as well as the wind, our bunker longevity can range anything from three-to-five years before they need a complete rebuild, so these natural bunkers we’re building last significantly longer.
- This article appears in Your Course, published by the British and International Golf Greenkeepers Association. Your Course invites golfers to gain a deeper appreciation of what preparing and maintaining a golf course really involves. Head to www.bigga.org.uk to find out more.
Now have your say
What do you think of these bunker requests, and did you know the lengths your greenkeepers went to construct them? Let us know in the comments, or get in touch on X.
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