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History

“Traverse Briefing by an admiring fan” September, 1999

This is Savannah Golf Links second season of play. It was constructed throughout 1997, was seeded in October of that year, and was opened for play by mid-May 1998. While it is not a super long course the emphasis here is on shot making accuracy. The front nine will play 3 or 4 shots longer than the back. There is plenty of design variety here, and if you’re going to score low at this track you will have to constantly focus on your next shot, weighing your options carefully.

Bogey Man September 1999

Watching the owners trimming the fairways of Savannah Golf Links can only be interpreted as a positive for golfers playing this beautiful new club. Any time you get ownership putting big bucks – and big efforts – back into the course, you have a winner. When newcomers first gaze upon the early morning mist rising off the first fairway, they will be hooked, just like our man in Savannah, me. Besides being the best new course of the season it is a genuine hidden gem amongst a blizzard of Ahhs.

Not long off the blues, the layout contains several uphill and downhill holes which add somewhat to the playing time, although under four hours is do-able. The operative word for savannah is Class, right from the simple scorecard unadorned with adverts to the attractive stone tee markers. The site sits supremely just south of Cambridge on a former bog. Preserving the integrity of these wetlands while adding fairways and elevated greens, required a top ecological design, but just routine for a member of the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Thirteen holes are influenced by lilly ponds, mellow marshes, bogs and wetlands, where all kinds of flora and fauna flourish. turtles have been spotted trundling across the tees.

The fascinating layout combines testing doglegs, elevated greens and a batch of bunkers in a surprising array of shapes and sizes. Using top OH-silica puts sand traps at the head of the class. Not to be missed is the drive off the golds at No. 7, made even more spectacular by the crumbling wall of an ancient farmhouse over which the drive should fly. Golfers who hit a straight drive will find no problem with No. 6, a dogleg around a swampy pondto a green whose fairway approach is deliberately blocked out by a tall pine…

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