"This much-ballyhooed addition to the Home of Golf's portfolio is ultimately disappointing."

John Huggan pens the second Castle Course at St. Andrews review and it's not pretty...

Quite apart from the air of mystery surrounding the final resting places of so many tee-shots, the most striking aspect of this picturesque layout high above the Auld Grey Toon becomes apparent once the golfer is lucky enough to have found his ball after driving into seeming oblivion. The architect, David McLay Kidd, calls them 'spill-offs'; my four-ball came up with a few other names – some of them printable – for the peculiar rough-covered mounds we discovered dotted indiscriminately about the fairways.

'Hairy mound' was the first, albeit rather prosaic offering. I myself favoured 'clumpy hillock'. Then there was 'Abe Lincoln chins'. But the most imaginative member of the group came up with 'enormous hoof-prints left by enormous horses'.

Whatever, these mysterious affectations – for they appear to have no immediately discernible architectural or strategic purpose – are intensely irritating. While golf, as someone once said, is a game never meant to be fair, searching for one's ball after striping one up the middle very quickly gets old. The always-tricky-to-locate line between luck and skill has been crossed here and crossed too often.