Royal Golf Club (Montgomerie)

Now part of the luxury Riffa Views residential complex, the new Montgomerie layout at the Royal Golf Club lies within three housing estates – Park, Lagoon and Oasis – and it will, in time, be serviced by a country club, complete with swimming pools, racquet courts and gardens.

The Montgomerie course is certainly a green oasis within a natural desert landscape where good use of the terrain has been made to fashion the layout around deep wadis and sandy waste bunkers. The closing four holes feature significant water hazards with man made lakes coming into play on the left side at 15 and 16 and the right side at the penultimate and closing holes.

To round off the whole set up at the Royal Club – and, some might contend, quite in keeping with the total artificiality of playing golf in such a non conducive environment – golfers, if they so desire, can play the back nine under state of the art floodlighting, teeing off as late as 8.30pm in the evening!

In 2011, the Royal Golf Club played host to the inaugural Volvo Golf Champions event, with the field comprising of 126 European Tour winners. England’s Paul Casey holed a six-foot par putt on the final green, claiming the title by one-shot from Miguel Angel Jiménez and Peter Hanson.

The following edited extract by Robin Hiseman is from Volume Six of Golf Architecture: A Worldwide Perspective. Reproduced with kind permission. To obtain a copy of the book, email Paul Daley at fswing@bigpond.net.au.

“The project centred on the eight-year-old Riffa Club. The clubhouse was retained, but nothing of the original design remained, with the majority being ploughed under for the new housing development. Only five holes were retained within the area of the old course, with the rest spreading out across a huge expanse of adjoining barren desert.

Apart from a wadi that features heavily in the front nine, the majority of the site was snooker-table flat, with barely a bush to be seen. What it did have was several active oil wells, crude oil dumps, gas flare pipes and a maze of overground oil pipes, radiating out from a central pipe corridor that split the site in two like a rusty rail track.

It was a thrilling task to attempt to turn this semi-industrial wasteland into a beautiful desert course. It was decided to create a links-style course, complete with countless bump-and-run opportunities, in the windswept Bahraini desert. I spent the winter of 2006 planning a course with the emphasis on holes with open, yet undulating green approaches.

Additionally, with pronounced ground ‘movement’ within the short grass areas that would influence the pitch and run of the ball. Luck, both good and bad, would play its part in this test of golf. In effect, the course design was engendered with an abundance of ‘local knowledge’ that could only be understood through repeated play.

Construction of the course was extremely complicated. There were a myriad of oil pipes that had to be removed from the playing areas, but these couldn’t move until the diversion pipes were installed; however, the phasing of that project was not under our control. Elsewhere, we had to accommodate the many other contractors working to construct the new houses, roads and infrastructure.

The natural sand resembles talc, and it proved totally unsuitable for anything but bulking out the shaping. Indeed, we imported every grain of sand with which the course was built. Fairways and tees were formed of a 45-centimetre layer of double-washed marine sand, dredged out of the Gulf (and) the greens were built with 30 centimetres of high-quality Saudi mineral sand.

Only one type of grass was used throughout the course: Sea Isle Supreme Paspalum, as it copes well with the salinity levels present in the sand and the relatively low quality of irrigation water produced by the desalination plant. The course was floodlit for the back nine and the entire ‘Wee Monty’ par-3 course (and) it was my task to appraise the position of all the floodlighting.

The Royal Golf Club is the most complex project that I’ve ever been involved with. And, for two-and-a-half-years, the most fun I’ve ever had while building a course. Braemar-Nass, our contractor, was a willing and co-operative partner. Successfully, we produced a course that fulfilled our concept of producing links-type conditions.”