Ordinary bunkers are, as a rule, made in quite the wrong way. The face is usually too upright and the ball gets into an unplayable position under the face. The bottom of the bank of a bunker should have a considerable slope, so that a ball always rolls to the middle; the top of a bunker may, as it usually does in nature, be made to overhang a little so as to prevent a topped ball running through it.
Experience gained in the imitation of natural slopes in bunker-making was ultimately responsible for saving tens of thousands of pounds in revetting material in the great war.
Trenches with the sides made like a bank of a stream with a considerable slope at the bottom remained standing without any revetting material.
Before this principle was pointed out soldiers invariably dug their trenches with a slope at the top, and as they got farther down the sides became more vertical and sometimes were even undercut. A trench of this kind invariably fell in, whereas those made vertical at the top with the slope at the bottom did not do so.
Hazards are usually placed too far away from the greens they are intended to guard; they should be placed immediately on the edge of the greens, and then (particularly if they are in the form of smooth hillocks and hollows) the player who is wide of them has an extremely difficult pitch, and is frequently worse off than the man who is in them.
A bunker eating into a green is by far the most equitable way of giving a golfer full advantage for accurate play. It not only penalises the man who is in it, but every one who is wide of it. For example, a player who is in the road bunker at the seventeenth at St. Andrews may with a good dunch shot get out and lie dead, but few can pitch over it so accurately that they do so. A bunker, similarly placed to the road bunker, may be made to accentuate this distinction; it may be constructed with so much slope that on occasions it can be putted out of.
Hummocks on the edge of greens are often constructed so that they assist the man who has opened up the hole correctly; they act as a hazard only to those who have failed to do this.
Perhaps the most serious mistake made by a golf committee is the fallacy that they will save money by neglecting to obtain expert advice in regard to fresh construction work.