In Wales, a golf course in quarantine has been revived after being inactive for decades – internationally

One Friday night in May, Chris Powell and 23 residents were in a field near their home in Ryder Hills, in Wales. Everywhere, familiar details dot the landscape, from a few winding paths to shrubs, a few stretches of ferns and a small house made of centuries-old stone.

But in the middle of the green were a few more things: flags, tags, tees (a pin used to hold the ball before the tee was released), bike tires that were painted red and set on the ground, and a selection of bags. Gulf.

While other people in the UK spent 2020 facing its own lockdowns الإغلاق pandemic Practicing his hobbies indoors, Powell spent nearly a thousand hours wandering around this once area golf lesson Local – A space that has been closed for over five decades and has slowly been incorporated into the landscape.

With his dedication and skill as a handyman when it came to regeneration, Powell was able not only to locate all of the tees and areas of lawn where holes were hidden amidst slopes and foliage, but also restore the field to be used again for golf practice. There were a few surprises during the renovation – like discovering links to a specific course in Augusta, Georgia, and now he and the group are ready to restore Rhayader Golf Links.

“When I start something, I get obsessed,” Powell, 63, said before the shooting. “The journey to this point began over a year ago, when the UK was just getting started. full lock Powell and his friend decided to walk the slopes to exercise.

Since their first visit to the site, Powell and his friend Martin Mason, 53, said they could clearly distinguish two areas with potholes. From there, he would return to camp every few days, hoping to find new details amidst bushes that he claimed were high in places.

Within a few months, Powell had discovered five or six holes and an equal number of tee boxes. At that point, he thought, “I’m going to create a charity day for golf” sometime this year.

“He wanted to make it playable by people who weren’t there,” said Mason, who sometimes helped him through the discovery process. “We didn’t know where this would take us.”

To find the last holes, he turned to the head of the local funeral home who played golf there when he was younger and can give him sights on the slopes that cyclists now use. He and his friend Mason discovered some golf cups (the containers where the balls should fall) using a metal detector. And also an old map of the course they found online that has a name familiar in golf circles: “Designed as planned by Dr. A. McKenzie, architect of the golf course.”

Alistair Mackenzie was a British golf course architect whose work spanned four continents. Over the past ten years, three courses he has designed – the Cypress Point Club in California, the Royal Melbourne Golf Club in Australia, and the Augusta National Golf Club in Georgia, home of The Masters, have been among the top ten in the world. “I was very surprised, I must say,” Powell said.

He also discovered a 1925 newspaper article mentioning MacKenzie as an architect and a brochure nearly 90 years old that documented the designer’s notes while on site. But the various golf course communities created by MacKenzie make no acknowledgment of the online Rhayader course, especially since membership, they claim, is for active courses only, and online schedules document that the architect was on site. X in the history of Y, rather than just listing the golf courses he must have worked on.

Nevertheless, Powell continued to work on his opposite to Augusta National Golf Club, hoping to one day host a competition in the hills of Wales. He got a lawn mower to mop the ground. Some nights he would walk around the court and throw balls which, when lost in the fairways, he could retrieve with the machete.

In April, a chance arose: the bush in the area died, giving him a few weeks to clear key sections of the field so it could be used, for some time before the ferns were reborn.

Players also came across some minor details. There were performance charts and directional signals drawn by Powell and his wife. The holes had names like Moonshot, where the first shot was loud and blind, and Rollercoaster, which required players to enter the valley and then throw the ball back toward the field. Ticket proceeds will be sent to issues in support of the UK’s public health service, the National Health Service (NHS).

“It’s going to be tough and disorganized,” said Ben Waters, 36, the field manager at the nearby Llandrindod Wells golf club where Powell now plays, and who had advised him for the past few months. “But that is not the question.” He was a guy who worked up a hill slope in his spare time.”

For about four hours, players roamed around the field dodging a deserted hole in the first hole. Each carried a hand-drawn map of the countryside, with black lines and sometimes a red X, which, according to the index, means “area with a lot of weeds.”

In the hidden holes, players had to make a noise with the boots Powell had put on to alert the group behind the scene that the place was safe. The fields were uneven, so hitting a red dot around a flag counts as the way its ball hits the hole. There were also cases where the holeshot required players to jump over the fence to get to the tee. The first group got all wet because of a quick rain.

When the last set of the match ended, the sun was already gone and starting to get dark. Sandwiches were served to the players in a hut and a Ryder Cup was presented to the winning team. Powell said he hopes the subsidy round will become an annual event.

“The saddest part is that next month it will be impossible to play in that field again,” he said. / Translated by Teresina Martino

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