Scotland’s Loch Lomond Golf Club is close to completing a four-year renovation project to revamp its course drainage, Golf Course Architecture reports.
The £7.5 million renovation project has given rise to a complete overhaul of the course’s drainage infrastructure, including sand capping, the installation of a new irrigation system, and reconstruction of its bunkers.
David Cole, Loch Lomond’s director of golf course and estates, told Golf Course Architecture: “We have a lot of bunkers and a lot of rain. We average around 2,000 millimetres of rain a year, and our bunker design has some steep faces in places. As a result, we have always suffered badly from washouts and contamination.
“Bunker maintenance is our second largest consumer of greenkeeping resources, second to greens – due to the design, the size, the amount, the player expectations and the environment, it takes a lot of resources to prepare the bunkers internally and externally for play on a daily basis, and it was frustrating not being able to produce a consistently good product from this valuable resource due to the ageing infrastructure and the uncontrollable element of frequent rainfall.”
Loch Lomond's drainage trenches have, therefore, been lined with geotextile as part of the project to prevent ingress of particles into the drainage pipes, which have also been resized to better accommodate the volume of water.
Cole and his team also wanted to improve the consistency of bunker presentation at Loch Lomond, and he explained that the benefits of the renovation work are already being felt after Capillary Concrete was used to line the bunkers.
“We aren’t spending hours pushing sand back up bunker faces after rain. Since the liner has been installed, the sand does not slip off the face after heavy rain events and daily preparations to present a good product for our members and guests is less labour intensive than previous.
“This allows us to focus more time on the detail work of internal bunker maintenance, and/or redirect resources to other priority areas that been neglected prior to this undertaking. I think we may see a 40 to 50 per cent reduction in resources we use preparing the internals of bunkers, yet still producing a superior product.”
Loch Lomond have been working on the renovations with contractor GolfLink Evolve since the winter of 2017-18, when the project commenced with a trial rebuild of holes 14 and 15 on the course.
After the successful trial works, full renovations were planned to be completed over the winter of 2019-20 but were set back by the Covid-19 outbreak, meaning that work was instead carried out over the winter of 2020-21, which now near their end.
