River's Edge GC - small tweak yields big returns

I'm always on the lookout for something different where golf holes are concerned and from this list of the 5 toughest golf courses in Myrtle Beach, it's the third hole at River's Edge GC in Shallotte, North Carolina that caught my eye.

This isn't even the most talked about hole on this course, let alone in the Myrtle Beach area (that honour tends to go to the 9th) but I like the way in which a small sliver of creek can impose itself so markedly on the way in which you play the hole.

Contrast it, for example, with the ugly, 'overkill' beach bunkers on some of the holes at Jack Nicklaus' Pawley's Plantation course.

Even if you opt to play safe with your second shot, it's not a shot you play on auto-pilot. Bunkers at the end of the left-hand finger of fairway require you to focus as much on length as on accuracy.

For the brave boomer, meanwhile, that neck of fairway leading into the green looks even narrower when you study a photo of the hole
but a fine risk-reward challenge nonetheless and further evidence for my belief that small features exerting a disproportionately large influence on a hole's strategy make for pleasing architecture.