Claudia Laurent

Golf writer, Golf Handicapp · 24 September 2026

198 yards down a maple valley at the exact week the colour turns, and the difficulty is hidden inside how good it looks. Both hillsides are stacked with Japanese maples at peak, scarlet through crimson to gold, layered one behind another, and the light coming through that canopy is warm and low and flattering. A clear stream runs along the floor over dark boulders and crosses in front of the green, and fallen red leaves lie drifted along the hand cut edge of the fairway. At 198 yards this is a long iron or a rescue for most people, over water, to a green with bunkers front and side. The trap is not the stream, it is the leaves. A ball pitching short and running on will be fine, but a ball that lands in leaf litter left or right of the green will be a nightmare to find and worse to play from, because there is no telling whether it is sitting up or buried. So this is a hole to play to the middle and take four. Take one more club than you think, aim at the fat of the green rather than the flag, and accept that a two putt from thirty feet here is a good score and a very pretty one.

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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AI-imagined golf hole: a short par 3 on a small green topped island in the North Atlantic, played from a small mown tee below a lone white house with a black roof, along a narrow strip of fairway on a flat grassy shelf to a green with two pale bunkers and a red flag set near the edge of sheer basalt sea cliffs

Elliðaey

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AI-imagined golf hole: a par 3 played from a striped tee on the shore of a Norwegian fjord across dead still black water to a floating green built on a timber pontoon, moored by chains and reached by a narrow jetty, with a sheer grey rock wall over a thousand metres high rising directly behind it, snow in the high gullies and thin waterfalls down its face

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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 24 September 2026.

The Maples

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The Moss

The Maze

Elliðaey

The Fjord

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