As any geek (like myself) knows, The Lord of the Rings was filmed in New Zealand and for the movie Peter Jackson built a replica of the Shire, complete with the requisite underground houses. The hobbit holes, which are shown at left, were left behind and now apparently are a major tourist attraction.

The idea apparently has caught on. A New Zealand developer has built a course with an underground clubhouse that has a grass roof. The roof is in play.

Developer Michael Hill’s course (known as The Hills, naturally), will host the New Zealand Open this week.

Hill also plans to build 17 homes on the course. Presumably much bigger than Bag End, these luxury villas will range from around 4,000 to 7,000 square feet.

Whether they match a hobbit hole in comfort remains to be seen. Tolkien tells us that hobbit holes “mean comfort.”

Hills says: “The whole idea is for the houses to merge into the landscape...If we can get them to remain nearly invisible then we’ve achieved what we want for the site.”

Its an amazing idea, and one that I’m surprised has not been thought of before.

Sports Illustrated has a list of the most terrifying course names: Purgatory Golf Club, The Devil’s Claw, The Blue Monster, Hell’s Point, Deep Cliff, Shark River, Devil’s Lake (I’ve played this one), The Monster Course, and the Bigfoot Golf and Country Club.

You can read more about the courses here.

I wrote about Devil’s Lake here as a part of my Halloween Week celebration a couple of years ago.

The World’s Most Dangerous Golf club is arguably the Kabul Golf Course in Afghanistan. It’s a true desert course, with greens made of sand and oil. Worse, the threat of suicide bombers loom, making the bunkers at your local course look positively inviting.

Angels Crossing
Vicksburg, Michigan

Overall Grade: B+
Value: A
Walkability: B
Course Conditions: A
Course Design: B+ (I question the design of a number of the greens)
Practice Facility: C
Food: Incomplete (I didn’t see any)
Teacher’s Comments: A spacious, interesting layout that’s designed to play like a 100-year-old classic.

Angels Crossing, in Vicksburg, Michigan, is a course of Brobdingnagian proportions. Laid out over 700 acres of prairie, woodlands and marsh, it offers a sense of space that I have seldom encountered on a course.

That isn’t to say that the course is unwalkable, for walk it I did. Unlike some “modern” courses, where the holes are separated by great distances, tees follow greens at very reasonable distances at Angels Crossing. The longest walk by far is from the clubhouse to the first tee.

It’s that first walk, though, that conveys an immediate sense of space and isolation. From the clubhouse, you walk past the practice green and tees, down a hill, follow a path along a river, cross over a marsh on a wooden walkway, pass through a covered bridge and then head back uphill to the first tee. It’s not until you reach that plateau that you actually can see the course.

The GolfBlogger is doing a little bit of an informal, unscientific survey here: What’s the most you’ve paid for a round of golf? Name the course, location and price.

For me, it was $85 at the Little Traverse Bay Golf Club in Harbor Springs, Michigan. Nice course, great vistas.