The 154th Open at Royal Birkdale: Why the Dunes Are the Real Story

The Open is back at Royal Birkdale this week, and with genuinely warm, dry weather forecast for all four days, we are about to see this course the way its architects actually intended it to be seen.

A course laid into the land, not onto it

Royal Birkdale sits among towering sand dunes, the kind of ground that tempts most architects into building holes up and over every rise for the view. Fred Hawtree and J.H. Taylor, who reshaped the course into more or less its current form in the early 1930s, did the opposite. They routed the holes through the natural valleys between the dunes rather than across the top of them.

It is a small decision that defines everything about how the course plays. Very few blind shots, everything laid out in front of you from tee to green. Birkdale is often called the fairest course on the Open rota, and it is fair precisely because the design respects what the land was already doing rather than fighting it. That is the same instinct I keep coming back to in Tom Doak's writing, even though he had nothing to do with this course. Great architecture does not sit on top of a great site. It listens to it first.

The difference between wet and dry

This is where the weather becomes the real story. A soft, rain sodden Open favours power and forgives mistakes, because the ground absorbs everything. This week is forecast to be the opposite, warm and largely dry, which will bake the course out and let the ground itself do the talking.

That matters more here than at most venues, because Birkdale's fairways and greens were shaped for a running ball, not a flying one. Firm and fast conditions do not just make the course harder. They make the architecture visible. You start to see exactly why a fairway falls the way it does, why a green sits at that angle, why the safe line off the tee is never quite as safe as it looks.

What I notice as a painter

What draws my eye is the contour itself, and how it was formed. These are natural dune valleys, shaped by wind and sand over centuries, not bulldozed hollows. Under strong sun, every ridge throws a shadow and every hollow holds one, and that pattern shifts constantly as the light moves across the day. A flat links can go dull in bright weather. This one will not, because the ground is never still.

The greens carry the same movement in miniature, crowned surfaces and false fronts that look flat from a distance and are anything but up close. That is the kind of subject that rewards walking a course before ever picking up a brush. A photograph tells you the colour. It rarely tells you how the ground was actually made.