Colt grew up inland, and even when becoming proficient while at Cambridge, might only have come across the true delights of the links with undergraduate sides travelling to matches on the great seaside courses. Certainly he must have encountered links golf at some point, as his first attempt at course creation was on the Camber sands to the east of Rye, near the Sussex/Kent border. And what a start!

After helping found the Club, and being its first secretary during the closing years of the 19th century, Colt moved to Sunningdale as their first secretary in 1901. It was there he discovered that conditions did exist inland that were ideal for golf, heath land. And the good news about the heath is that it had little other practical use.

The soil is similar to that found by the sea. Acid, with fine powdery sand, and the same grasses that work so well on the links, thrive inland. At Sunningdale Colt came across a superb early example of what could be done with that type of ground. The Old Course was Sunningdale's original layout and put there by Willie Park Jnr, himself twice a winner of the Open Championship in the late 1890's.

As Colt evolved from management to architecture his abiding principal became enhancement of the countryside into which he put his courses. They must blend in with, not be imposed upon, their environment. Only then could they 'live' with their surroundings, grow to be a part of them, and so survive the passage of time, and the evolution of the game. They would become 'a lasting record of his craft and his love for his work'

Much of Colt's philosophy on course design has been left to Charles Alison to put down on paper. Alison learnt his trade at Colt's knee and later became, along with John S F Morrison and Alister MacKenzie, a partner in the business. Obviously a fair amount of Colt's early work involved upgrading existing layouts and Alison vividly describes the conditions he found, particularly inland.

'There was only one form of bunker. It consisted of a rampart of sods with a trench in front, filled with a sticky substance, usually dark red in colour. The face of the rampart was perpendicular. It was precisely 3ft 6ins in height, and ran at right angles to the direction of the hole. The number of such obstacles varied only according to the length and bogey (par) of the hole. Thus a short hole required one, a drive and approach shot two, and a long hole three.'

'Another notable feature of suburban golf was the flatness of the terrain, particularly the approaches to the greens. Very seldom was a green placed in such a position as to render the approach play naturally or visibly interesting, while to create grass slopes or hollows artificially was an unknown art.'

'The fairways were invariably rectangular, the putting greens square and flat. No attempt was made to put undulations into the greens, indeed clubs with resources flattened them like bowling greens or cricket pitches, the poorer ones apologising to guests when theirs were somewhat uneven.'

In short, inland courses from the Victorian era had made little or no attempt to draw on the wonderful legacy of the links. Everything was flat and square and Colt saw it as his primary task to work with angles and bends, slopes and undulations - the curves of nature - and to make courses appear part of the existing countryside. His creed might be found in the words of James Braid, who said of his work at Gleneagles, 'God laid this course out, I only found it.'

So from courses that laid waste their surroundings, Colt introduced those that worked in with their natural environment. He, along with his contemporaries of the day, Herbert Fowler and J F Abercromby, really did use Britain's links heritage as the blue print of their work. In their hands bunkers ceased to be 'no man shall pass' barriers, but were sited so as to capture crooked shots and were to be found around the fringes of fairway and green.

There was usually trouble in front of most tees, but only so much as to punish the topped or miss hit shot. A well struck shot by even the shortest hitters should be allowed to find the fairway. Accuracy was to be rewarded and golf turned into a fun examination for all standards of player. The dogleg became a feature under these early 20th century designers, and doglegs that often asked the golfer to work out how much of the corner he might cut off.

Bunkering became not just a means of punishing the crooked shot, but also a hazard for the better player to cross in search of advantage over the lesser man, to whom he may well be conceding a shot. Small, well sited collections of bunkers were to be found set at an angle to the tee shot, so the longer the hitter, the more of the corner he might try and cut off. In this and so many other ways Colt and his like started to introduce intellectual puzzles into the game, adding interest to what was also becoming a more beautiful walk.

Unquestionably, bunkers were in all instances hazards; go into them and the first pre-requisite was to get out and in those days that meant the niblick. In the mind of the designer, straying from the straight and narrow should cost a shot. Only great skill later in the hole might make amends for the earlier mistake.

The shape and style of bunkers differed from one designer to another. Colt, perhaps staying closer to what he saw at the sea side, favoured the deep 'pot', small in overall size, but deep enough that just getting out required the right technique and not a little skill. The best example of his bunkering is probably to be found at Royal Lytham & St Annes, lots of bunkers and most of them deep.

Alister MacKenzie favoured great flashes of sand, bold statements that immediately caught the eye. His courses would have fewer bunkers, but would cause just as many problems. The most concentrated collection of his work is to be found in that fine stretch of golfing country, the Melbourne sandbelt. Here you will find a handful of the best courses in the world. His most famous though, and a fine example of his style, is Augusta National. Alison himself would be somewhere in between Colt and MacKenzie, but all three saw bunkers as punishment for error, not the shallow splash pits that so many modern designers now favour.

Colt and his colleagues had a few simple dictums. The early holes should ease you into the round; nothing too demanding at the start. Ideally, every club in the bag should be used, regardless of skill. The routing of the course would be determined by the land, and there would be no hard and fast rule about the numbers of par threes or fives on any given nine.

Colt had no peer as a designer of short holes. Both Rye and the New Course at Sunningdale have five apiece and it is harder to imagine a better set anywhere. On both courses they vary from less than 150 yards to just over 200, again requiring all manner of clubs depending on the direction and strength of the wind. In addition, the 7th at the Stoke Poges course (now Stoke Park Club), Colt's first truly solo effort at course design, became the inspiration for Augusta's infamous 12th at the centre of Amen Corner.

Looking around at the legacy of Colt and his generation, one is struck by the wonderful mastery of scale; small greens at the end of winding, narrow fairways reached from tees set back behind a meaningful, but not too daunting collar of rough; each hole an entity in itself, a country lane wandering through a picturesque setting.