Kulm Golf: Views Above Par

It was the British guests of the Engadin who gave Switzerland its first golf clubs and courses, modelled on the template they knew from home. The earliest mention of a course between the railway station and St. Moritz Bad appeared on 27 June 1891 in the English-language Alpine Post, announcing that a nine-hole layout would be ready after the hay harvest, sometime in the second week of July, all being well. One ought to picture something rather closer to a glorified sheep meadow than the manicured fairways and pristine greens we know today. This inaugural Swiss course, trading under the name of the St. Moritz Golf Club, was quietly abandoned not long after.

A Game That Wasted No Time

Golf, however, swept through the Engadin at quite a lick. By 1893, the municipality of Samedan had granted the Hotel Bernina permission to build an 18-hole course in the Champagna, which duly opened that very same year. The Engadin Golf Club, founded simultaneously, today unites all the golf clubs of the Upper Engadin and holds the distinguished title of the oldest golf club on the European continent.

From 1898, guests were once again able to take a swing across nine holes in the sweeping grounds of the Kulm Hotel. That course survived until 1964, when it was reluctantly retired, only to be triumphantly revived from 2001 onwards, thanks to the initiative of St. Moritz-based golf course architect Mario Verdieri, a renaissance that continues to this day.

Small but Perfectly Formed: The Kulm Golf Course

Beyond the frankly ridiculous views of the surrounding mountains, the course itself is beautifully designed and thoroughly unforgiving. It folds naturally into the contours of the land and serves up a succession of genuinely distinctive challenges. The nine-hole, par-3 layout, just shy of 1,000 metres in total, demands precision off the tee at every turn, with hazards lurking around seemingly every corner. As the trade publication Golf.de neatly puts it: “The holes are tight, the elevation changes call for both technique and stamina. A course that teaches humility, and seduces with its historical aura.”

A Few Minutes of Magic

James Hogg’s brief was to photograph the course afresh, to see it anew. A great number of the shots were taken at sunrise or sunset, during what photographers reverently call the “golden hour,” when the light does things that simply cannot be argued with. But for all its gilded promise, the golden hour here comes with conditions. Each morning, thick fog rolled in without fail. Hogg describes it as quite the challenge, though one that simultaneously offered something rather rare. “Some of my favourite images were taken precisely in those moments when the mist began to lift,” he says.

Come evening, the surrounding peaks cast shadows stretching for kilometres across the course. The viable window for the perfect shot would shrink to just a few minutes. For Hogg, light is everything. The right moment, he explains, can make or break an image entirely. Exploring a landscape with a lens in hand, he adds, is one of his great pleasures in life.

But it wasn’t only the daylight hours that captivated him. Hogg recounts how, one night, he wandered the course alone in pursuit of the Milky Way. “Light pollution here is extraordinarily low and the air quality is exceptional,” he enthuses. The stars, it seems, are well and truly aligned, at least for anyone with a fondness for the Engadin and a soft spot for golf.