The way to Old Macdonald does not announce much. There is a pro shop and a snack bar, where the breakfast sandwich makes a fine start to the day. Then comes a path that runs beside a large practice green. For a while you see almost nothing of the golf course. Only when you reach the starter's shack does the first hole unfold in front of you, and the moment quickens the pulse. It is fitting that a course built as a tribute should begin by withholding itself. Old Macdonald opened at Bandon Dunes in the summer of 2010, the fourth 18-hole layout on the property. Mike Keiser first imagined something more literal: a reproduction of the Lido Golf Club, the lost Charles Blair Macdonald and Seth Raynor course on Long Island. His advisers warned him away from a replica, and Keiser changed course. He turned again to Tom Doak and Jim Urbina, whose Renaissance Design team had built Pacific Dunes a decade earlier, and asked for fresh interpretations of Macdonald's ideal holes instead. For further guidance he turned to the Macdonald biographer George Bahto, the architecture historian Bradley Klein, and Karl Olson, once superintendent at National Golf Links of America. The building took three years. What emerged is neither a museum nor a copy. The Redan, the Sahara and the Alps are here, echoes of holes Macdonald based on British originals at the National a century before, with Raynor as his construction engineer. Some arrive as faithful covers, others as remixes, and a few are original tunes altogether. Seeded entirely in fescue, the ground feels less like an actual Macdonald and Raynor course than like the linksland that inspired those men in the first place. It does not merely imitate the surface of its models but absorbs their deeper structure. The routing follows a clear arc. It starts inland, moves over the dunes at the third, and then spends most of the round in the open with the Pacific in view before turning inland again for the last two holes. The main arena, holes 3 through 16, sits in a broad bowl framed by two dune ridges, one inland and one by the sea. The most memorable holes lie near or on those ridges, where good natural topography was waiting. Yet many of the boldest design features live toward the center of the bowl, where the architects had to work harder to make compelling golf. That contrast is the course's quiet drama: gifted land at the edges, hard-won ground in the middle. Generosity is the first impression. Fairways often run 60 to 80 yards wide, and, as at the National, the greens are enormous, more than six acres combined, almost as big and bold as those on the Old Course at St Andrews. Three of the four par threes come on the front nine, at the second, fifth and eighth, so the short game is severely tested early in the round. Only the greens at the third and ninth sit on true natural sites. The other sixteen were shaped, and they blend so seamlessly into their surroundings that the craft seems to disappear. Walk the round and you start choosing favorites, wondering which green you would carry home to your own backyard. The Double Plateau is one contender. The chaotic, multi-level fifth is another. The sixth may be the best of all, a squared-off expanse of billows, channels, bulges and bowls arranged so intricately that one visit cannot take it all in. A small, mean pot bunker hides at the back. Old Macdonald gives you plenty of room, and then it quietly shows its teeth.