Claudia Laurent
Golf writer, Golf Handicapp · 21 September 2026
196 yards to a green that sits on top of a wall. The putting surface has been built on a circular drum of stacked turf sods standing three times the height of a man, and a single unbroken bunker runs right the way round the foot of it, so the green is an island in sand with no run up, no front edge and no bail out. There is one way on and it is a wooden staircase climbing the face of the wall, with a timber bridge at the back for the greenkeepers. Everything inside the mown lines is immaculate and everything outside them is heather, coarse grass and grey granite, because the course has been laid across open moorland and the rock was there first. From the tee the drum sits small on the skyline at the far end of a long rising corridor of fairway, and that is the first problem: a target raised above you always looks nearer than it is, and a target with nothing behind it to measure against looks nearer still. Almost everyone takes too little club. The second problem is the one that costs the shots. A ball that finishes in the sand is at the foot of a fifteen foot revetted wall, and from there the only realistic shot is sideways or backwards. The play is the extra club, aimed at the fat middle of the green, accepting that a putt from forty feet is a good outcome here and anything in the sand is not.
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.
