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Hagg’s Castle’s silver lining It wasn’t the best day that Scott Ballantyne, Course Manager at Glasgow’s Hagg’s Castle Golf Club, had ever experienced, and the fact that it was just before Christmas merely compounded his misery, but there has been a glorious silver lining to that particular cloud. “It was the Friday before Christmas 2016 and someone popped in to tell me that there was a burst drain at the back of the 1st green,” recalled Scott. “We went to investigate and what we found was just like a river spewing out sewage and it was coming from the Shieldhall Tunnel project, the £100 million city sewage project which involved a tunnel being dug under the city,” explained Scott, adding that he has since become something of an expert on the Shieldhall Tunnel. The tunnel, now completed, runs underneath a significant part of the golf course, including the 7th hole, the 2nd tee, the 17th and 18th tees, the 16th and all the way up the length of the 17th, in total around 600 metres of golf course. Issues occurred when the drill bit struck unexpected rock. “I’d never been given an indication that there might be a problem but it happened and we had to deal with it. We dealt with the mess that Friday and then shut down over Christmas
for two weeks,” recalled Scott. With festivities over everyone returned to work and when the tunnellers turned on their drill it all happened again – an illsmelling recurring nightmare. “We cleared it with squeegees for the second time and sacrificed two bunkers which we decided we’d have to rebuild. We told the tunnel constructors that we couldn’t keep clearing up the mess every time it happened so we told them just to go for it and we’d sort it out at the end. We shut down the 16th and 17th holes while they worked and insurance paid for the damage to the course.” With the course returned to its full glory there was some revenue left over and this was put to good use with a superb new chipping area alongside the club’s brand new maintenance facility. “It was always the plan to make the existing practice green bigger, but when we looked at it we realised we could put in what we have now – a bunker and full size pitching area surrounded by a fence, much of which we’d already bought to protect the workers who were building the maintenance facility.” Knowing that the club had the money for the project but still looking for the best result without spending
money unnecessarily, Scott turned to Rigby Taylor to examine the options and it turned into a great opportunity to use a new product – Rigby Taylor’s R Duo 50-50 blend of poa reptans and Browntop bents. Everyone was confident having witnessed successful trials of the mix a Loch Lomond Golf Club during which it was starved, fed and shaved but what it hadn’t faced was the hand which the Beast from the East dealt it. “It was March and we had just put down a bag of seed when the weather turned and the temperature went minus for a couple of weeks A couple of days after it went in the ground froze solid }
Turf Matters | NOVEMBER-DECEMBER 2018 | 65