Action taken to avert Castle Stuart landslides

Following heavy rain, two landslides occurred at the new European Tour venue during the event in July while a third one is believed to have happened the night after the world No 1, Luke Donald, had claimed the title.

That led to concern being expressed about the suitability of the Highlands venue for one of the Tour’s biggest events.

However, as a two-day de-briefing got under way yesterday involving course staff and Tour officials, it emerged assurances have been made about the threat of future landslides.

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.

“The course recovered rather quickly from the impact of the Friday/Saturday storm during the Scottish Open and has been a pleasure to play since then.

“In any case, the new system puts in very large diameter pipes to carry extreme volumes of storm water down the slopes from above where the water naturally wanted to collect on the upper level of our site and, in fact, caused problems during the Scottish Open.

“We’re already well along with channels that assist the collection of the water while directing it to the large sump basins and pipes that will take it down and out to the firth – underground, of course, and revegetated accordingly to make any scars of the July storm disappear.

“We will finish the intrusive aspects of constructing the system when our season ends on 20 November.”

As things stand, the Scottish Open is due to return to Castle Stuart next summer. The surprise decision by Barclays to end their sponsorship of the event has thrown a spanner in the works, but, according to Parsinen, he was expecting the two-day “formal debriefing” with Tour officials to be looking at how things could be improved overall for next year rather than pondering about whether the event would actually be heading to the Highlands again.

In fact, he is confident the European Tour will be able to tie up a new sponsor before too long and keep the event in its coveted slot on the schedule the week before the Open Championship. Speaking during last month’s Dunhill Links Championship, George O’Grady, the Tour’s chief executive, said he was keen to have the situation resolved before the end of the year, revealing that French Open organisers had already made it known they would like to move their event if the Scottish Open fell short of the commercial return expected from that particular week.

“We’ll be finalising and agreeing edits to the course with the Tour today and tomorrow,” said Parsinen. “We don’t expect any surprises there – plus we’ve already started on some of the usual winter improvements to the course and infrastructure we targeted independent of the Scottish Open.

“On the 2012 Scottish Open, we have always been aware that Barclays might not extend their sponsorship that came up for renewal after the 2011 tournament. So we weren’t surprised. The European Tour staff we deal with are quite confident that a new sponsorship programme will come to fruition.

“There are a number of quality parties in conversation with the Tour presently and I believe the question is when specifics will get resolved and announced rather than if an attractive sponsorship will come to pass.

“At the same time, I reserve the right to be surprised by any turn of events as we are not at the centre of the deliberations and negotiations themselves.

“The Tour is contractually committed to us and for all important considerations they seem focused on, they liked how the event went this year – excepting the weather, of course – and actively want to return. So we’ll see.”