Claudia Laurent
Golf writer, Golf Handicapp · 21 September 2026
140 yards on an island with one house on it. The tee is a small square of mown turf on the grass below the lodge, the fairway is a narrow strip laid along the only flat ground there is, and the green sits at the far end of that shelf with two pale bunkers and a single flag, a few paces from where the ground stops and two hundred feet of basalt falls into the North Atlantic. Everything outside the mown lines is rough wind cropped grass, bare volcanic rock and seabird cliffs, because the island was never anything but a summer hunting station and the golf is a guest on it. There is no bail out and there is no reload. What makes it hard is the thing that makes every exposed seaside hole hard, which is that the wind is never doing on the green what it appears to be doing on the tee. On a small island with cliffs on every side the air lifts as it comes off the water and rolls over the top, so a ball struck into it climbs more than it should and one struck downwind runs further than anyone expects. The play is a low, hard, deliberately dull shot that stays under the worst of it, aimed at the fat middle of the green rather than the flag, and accepting that anything which misses on the seaward side is not a bad shot, it is simply gone.
This hole is not real. Like every hole in the collection it was conjured with AI, a golf daydream rather than a course you can go and play. The thousands of courses in the Golf Handicapp app, however, are very real.
This one is make-believe. The thousands of courses in the app are not.
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About the author
Claudia Laurent · Golf writer, Golf Handicapp
Claudia writes about the World Handicap System, golf scoring and getting more from every round for Golf Handicapp. She is a mid-handicap golfer who logs every card, the good ones and the ones she would rather forget.
This image is AI-generated. Published 21 September 2026.
