A golf course superintendent tore roughly a quarter of Royal Birkdale's bunkers out before the 2026 Open Championship, down to 108, and one reason was labour, not difficulty.
You have been taught to read a bunker as the course defending itself: more sand means harder, fewer bunkers means the course went soft. That is the golfer's math, and it is wrong. A revetted links bunker is not dug, it is built by hand out of stacked turf, and the crew rebuilds it on rotation for the life of the golf course. It is the single most labour-punishing object a links maintenance crew owns.
Between 2023 and 2025 the architects Mackenzie & Ebert drew up the plan and contractor GolfLink Evolve did the work in two phases, taking the bunker count down to 108. The ones removed were, in the club's own framing, no longer in play, or only penalised the shorter hitter off the tee, or could not be maintained or drained to championship standard. Two of those three reasons are about labour and water, not golf. The bunkers that stayed were re-revetted by hand, refilled with a more resilient coastal sand, and many had their surrounds raised back into the player's sightline. The 5th and 7th holes were rebuilt in place for drainage, the same enemy that forced a full rebuild of all eighteen greens in the early 1990s.
Watch the full documentary: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GXi-vJZT_lc