brierwood articles

Plot every tee and green on a map and a pattern shows. The first tee, the tenth tee and the ninth green are clustered together. The first and tenth tees are about 111 yards apart, the ninth green is about 68 yards from the first tee, and it is about 72 yards from the tenth. The eighteenth green finishes about 168 yards from the first tee.

That means each nine begins and ends close to the same place, so a round could start on either nine, or stop after nine holes, without a long walk back.

From that hub the course spreads wide. Measured from the first tee, the holes reach about 1,500 yards to the east, near the fifth, and about 940 yards to the west, at the sixteenth and seventeenth. Overall the holes cover about 2,440 yards from east to west and about 1,310 yards from north to south, roughly 1.4 miles by three-quarters of a mile.

The front nine heads northeast on the first two holes, southeast on the third through fifth, west on the sixth and seventh, north and west on the eighth, and southwest on the ninth. The back nine starts east and south, plays west on the twelfth, north on the thirteenth and fourteenth, west on the fifteenth and sixteenth, northeast on the seventeenth and east on the eighteenth.

The directions come from GPS positions published for the original layout. They are a good guide to how the holes lay on the land, and the interactive map shows them over satellite imagery.