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One interesting thing about getting older is how the past catches your senses by surprise on occasion. You'll hear or even smell something and it will instantly transport you back a decade or two.
That most recent trigger for me was the distinctive call of the northern bobwhite, literally a whistled "bob-WHITE!" every few seconds as moisture from the previous night's rain evaporated off of the hills around me.
For a moment, I was in college again, setting out for a Hardee's chicken biscuit and an early-morning practice, "bob-WHITE" echoing through the trees every few seconds as I made my way around our home golf course in Lexington, Virginia. The northern bobwhite's other name? The Virginia quail.
This time, I was about 100 miles northwest of Lexington, at Tributer Resort an hour north of Richmond, Virginia, a brand-new stay-and-play golf option with a solid base and some very ambitious future plans.
Cutalong Golf Course at Tributer Resort
Throwback golf course design is all the rage these days. A generation's worth of restoration-oriented remodels at Golden Age clubs has inspired dozens of new-builds and radical renovations that allude to the past at times and outright borrow (or perhaps steal) from it at others. Many architects working today have built some sort of Redan hole and dabbled in other templates from the C.B. Macdonald/Seth Raynor/Charles Banks menu of features and golf hole concepts, which themselves originated in the game's earliest outposts.
In laying out Cutalong, Tributer Resort's 18-holer, experienced architect Tom Clark opted to send golfers on a trip through the annals of his profession. The course, which was built five years before the resort came along, is eclectic by concept: a collage of hole features and styles pulled from the long arc of golf design history. The golfer bounces back and forth between moments influenced by America's early architects of note, names more familiar to golfers in England and Scotland and more modern masters as well. The offbeat nature of the course makes it an interesting counterpoint to layouts that strive for a unified feel, sometimes at the expense of inventiveness. In that way, Cutalong is more like a short story collection than a novel.
Not all of Clark's old-school design concoctions work completely, but there is a feeling of surprise when something resonates. Cutalong starts off strong, with a fun run of holes from 3 to 5: a semi-blind par 5 that plays past traces of the former mining operations on site, followed by a par 3 inspired by number 17 at Pebble Beach and a drivable par4 with Pete Dye-style railroad ties scattered about. On the 15th hole, a shortish downhill and sidehill par 4, Clark set staggered, multi-fingered bunkers into the tilt of the land that are inspired by the flame-shaped hazards at Alister MacKenzie's Cypress Point Club, but fashioned a Punchbowl green complex beyond, inspired by Macdonald's famed National Golf Links of America. This single-hole mashup would feel far out-of-place as a one-off moment within an otherwise coherent course, but it ends up being just the latest experiment in a course full of them.
There is scarcely a tame green on the course; a few of them have actually been redesigned for the sake of everyday playability. This is one area where Clark mostly holds to a single style; Cutalong's bentgrass putting surfaces ripple out with all manner of decks, tiers and runoffs. The green of the par-5 8th hole cascades down a hill with half a dozen different tiers in an apparent homage to Alister MacKenzie's no-longer-existent but vaunted Sitwell Park green in England. The eclecticism of the greens makes it worth playing on back-to-back days. The green fee for on-site guests is $179.
Lodging, amenities and the future of Tributer Resort
Cutalong is likely to remain Tributer's lone golf course for the time being, but the property's developers have big ambitions for the coming years. Within the overall 1,400-acre envelope, there is a scenic 400-acre parcel that will one day house a new course by Tiger Woods' TGR Design group, as well as about 130 standalone homesites and a host of amenities that will form a private club within Tributer.
Reef Capital Partners, the Utah-based group whose portfolio includes Black Desert Resort in St. George and the new Marcella Club near Park City, aims to bring in a comprehensive list of amenities to keep Tributer visitors and residents busy throughout central Virginia's own four seasons. New dining venues, spas and pools, walking trails, fishing ponds, indoor and outdoor shooting experiences, a working farm and event venue and a village where the property meets the shoreline of nearby Lake Anna are all on this to-build list as memberships and homesites are sold.
For now, Tributer is primarily functioning as a boutique golf resort within easy reach of Richmond, D.C. and points farther north, south and west along the eastern seaboard. Cooper's, the restaurant inside the modern-barn Cutalong clubhouse, is a winner for breakfast, lunch and dinner. Nearby, an entertaining putting course is lighted until midnight for extra bet-settling. A neighborhood of two-bedroom Cottages ($500 per night) and four-bedroom Villas ($1,200 per night) stands waiting for visiting groups of golfers to spend a couple of days chasing birdies and, if they pause long enough, listening to them as well.
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