EcoSward liner at Cavendish: Cavendish Golf Club in Buxton, England, has completed the first phase of a multi-year course renovation, including the construction of several new bunkers in an attempt to return the course more closely to Alister MacKenzie’s original design.
And, although the bunkers echo MacKenzie’s work in their positioning, they are built using up to the minute construction techniques – including the EcoSward bunker liner from EcoBunker.
EcoSward liner at Cavendish
“We gave the choice of bunker liner a lot of thought,” says architect Jonathan Gaunt, who is supervising the work (and who is also a member of the club). “We considered a rubber crumb product, but eventually discarded it, as we thought it was not appropriate for the landscape, and it is very expensive. I used another product at Whittington Heath in Lichfield, and it worked very well there, but it needs heavy machinery to manoeuvre it into place, and Cavendish isn’t a site that such machines can really access.”
Gaunt knew EcoBunker CEO and inventor Richard Allen well, and had used the company’s EcoSward liner at Caddington Golf Club (in fact, the liner’s debut). EcoSward, which is made from recycled artificial grass, is renowned as perhaps the toughest of all textile-based liner systems. It is completely resistant to burrowing animals – an important consideration in an environment like Cavendish, which is bordered by moorland, and comes in metre wide, 5m long strips, which are stuck together with adhesive to produce a single surface with no joints that sand could penetrate.
The Cavendish work also incorporates selective woodland management, taking out lower quality species such as sycamores thus focusing attention on oaks, beech and specimen pines. Gaunt says that clearing on the left side of the eleventh hole has enabled the fairway to be moved right to the edge of a ravine, with spectacular results.
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