Pound Ridge opens Saturday

It's strange to think that Pound Ridge Golf Club is Pete Dye's first project in New York state but looking at the website for this public course, which opens on Saturday, you could almost take a stab at the designer even if you didn't know him, just by looking at the holes.

I don't doubt for a minute that Pound Ridge could be great fun to play, as long as you're perfectly honest as to which of the five tee boxes you'll fire from, but I find that a lot of Dye courses don't sit comfortably on the terrain.

I get the impression that if the great man thinks a hole must be tweaked a certain way to maximise its challenge and your pleasure in rising to it, then he's not overly fussy about the architectural convention of making that tweak look like it was part of the natural landscape.

Once again, some of the mounding in the hole photographs looks stark and lacks subtlety (see the 8th and 16th, for example, although the 7th looks a welcome exception) and the scattergun bunker placement is too faux links for my taste.

Credit to the club, though, for including a couple of press reviews on its website that don't gloss over Dye's eccentricities. Age is certainly not wearying his mercilessness - the 12th to 14th stretch looks like real eye-of-the-needle stuff, no matter which tee you start from.