Castle Stuart, Scottish Open Update

Martin Dempster 
reports on "extensive work" being undertaken at Castle Stuart to ensure last year's landslides won't happen this year. That's assuming the European Tour finds a sponsor for the Scottish Open, a topic touched on later in the piece.

Thanks to reader Brian for sending the story and for pointing out this, which contributed to the slides during the freak storm:

It follows work being implemented to install an extensive storm water drainage system and permission being granted to discharge storm water into the Moray Firth.

While the weather that hit Castle Stuart was described as “a freak of nature”, the situation wasn’t helped by the lower level of the two-tier course not being allowed to have drainage due to it being an environmentally sensitive site.

“Even though we’ve always drained exceptionally well to begin with under normal heavy rainfall, this will prevent what happened from happening again and help the site drain better under more normal heavy rain,” Mark Parsinen, Castle Stuart’s managing partner and co-designer told The Scotsman.

“We now won’t have to collect water on site and rely too heavily on ground absorption during heavy storms.”
Part of the new drainage system, which was designed in tandem with an engineering firm, is already in place. It will be finished after the course shuts for the season in just under three weeks’ time.

“At the moment, it’s hard to see where the landslides occurred unless you look hard for them,” added Parsinen.