Claudia Laurent

Golf writer, Golf Handicapp · 16 September 2026

111 yards over boiling water. The tee sits on firm mown ground at one edge of an active geothermal basin and the green sits on firm ground at the other, and everything in between is off limits in a way no other hazard in golf quite manages. Pools of hard electric blue and milky turquoise lie in a pale mineral crust, each one rimmed in bands of orange, rust and sulphur yellow that bleed outward across the pan, and steam comes off every one of them and drifts low across the whole basin. A geyser plays away to the left, well clear of the line. The only way to the green is a raised timber boardwalk on low piles, because the crust between the pools is thin and will not take a person’s weight. Everything inside the mown lines is kept immaculately and everything outside it is scalded bare ground. What makes a short hole like this hard has nothing to do with the number. On an ordinary par 3 a poor shot costs a stroke and a drop, and somewhere in the back of your mind you know that. Here there is no drop, no search and no second ball, and that knowledge does something to a swing: people grip tighter, steer it, and quit on it halfway through. The answer is to take one more club than the yardage asks for so you can swing easily rather than hard, and to aim at the widest part of the green rather than at the flag. A committed swing with too much club finishes long and safe. A careful one with exactly the right club finishes in the steam.

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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A short par 3 across a working hill farm in a Lakeland valley, from an immaculate striped tee to a green ringed by crags with a bunker either side, a herd of Highland cattle standing on the mown ground between them having come through an open field gate, a drover waiting by the gate, and a clean gravel cart path running up the right beside a dry stone wall

The Bullring

Par 3 · 122 yards

A par 3 played from a mown tee on the start gate at the top of a ski jump tower, straight down the line of the concrete inrun ramp with its steel guide rails, to a green with two bunkers on the flat outrun far below, ringed by empty tiered spectator terraces, with the first snow of the year settling over the landing hill and dark conifer forest on both sides

The Inrun

Par 3 · 162 yards

A par 3 played across the top of a waterfall that pours off a green clifftop straight into the Atlantic, from a tee on one side to a green with one bunker on the headland opposite, with black basalt cliffs dropping sheer to the sea below and a pale path crossing the river upstream on a stone slab bridge

The Falls Edge

Par 3 · 145 yards

A short par 3 played from a tee on a headland of blinding white marl, across two great weathered steps of white rock, to a green laid on a lower terrace with one pale bunker and a dry stone kerb along its seaward edge, with clear turquoise Mediterranean water breaking white at the foot of the rock

The Scala

Par 3 · 120 yards

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 16 September 2026.

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