b'GOLFLeft: Andrew Carnegie of the setting, it was inevitable that the game would oneplays golf at Skibo in day return. That day finally came a few years after the1905. Below: the hotelier Peter de Savary acquired Skibo in 1990.original clubhouse in 1920. Right: the He commissioned the successful golfer, turned writer,remodelled course turned golf course architect, Donald Steel, to create aprovides interesting links course over a glorious, compact peninsula encircledoptions for playerson three sides by Loch Evelix and the Dornoch Firth.Steel, who has some 80 to 90 new courses to his name, is a great believer in fitting the design to the landscape. His new design for The Carnegie Links opened in 1994, with a televised Shells Wonderful World of Golf tussle between two top players of the dayGreg Norman and Fred Couplesshowcasing it to the world a couple of years later.Golf had returned to Skibo with gusto, and a very welcome addition it was too. So why the need for further remodelling and improvement works less than a decade later? There are two main reasons: new ownershipand therefore new investmentplus new opportunity.Just as no two artists would paint the same picture if42given a blank canvas, no two golf course architects would come up with the same course layout over the same terrain. Especially when slightly freer brushstrokes are possible, as they were for Tom Mackenzie when he was brought in again by Skibos then-new owner, Ellis Short, to reimagine The Carnegie Links in 2003. Mackenzie had also assisted Steel with the initial design. There were constraints over planning originally, Mackenzie explains. The second time around we were able to have another go at the planning side of things and, because Skibo had done everything they had undertaken to do, we had the advantage of being able to do certain things that hadnt originally been allowed.Skibos director of golf David Thomson takes up the story: The first thing we did was to change the routing. It used to go first, second and then on to what is now our sixth, which meant you were hitting a lot of fiddly irons shots for the first four or five holes. So we changed the routing and then started redesigning. We moved a lot of sand to create a natural dune-scape that tied the second hole into the existing topography.We were able to separate certain holes and move away from some conflict that existed between holes where they were married together in a slightly unorthodox way, Gruber adds. Weve been able to provide real distinction between the holesreal separation, real architectural interestand the one thing that Skibo is all about: a feeling of relative solitude.'