POLAND SPRING – Breathtaking, beautiful, and just plain awesome.

Perched on the tee of the fourth hole at Poland Spring Country Club, the view is easily worth the price of admission. Add to it the echoing wails of the common loon, a regular soundtrack to a round of golf at the 111-year-old Donald Ross-designed golf course, and it is easy to forget that there are more than 200,000 people in a 35-mile radius.

“It’s certainly unique,” course Superintendent Dick Fahey said of the setting. “Not too many places can tell you you can hear a loon in the middle of a round like that.”

Then again, not many courses in Maine were designed quite like Poland Spring, which is the oldest resort course in Maine, and one of six designed by world-renowned designer Donald Ross.

“You look at courses that he designed, and there are always similar features,” Fahey said. “He used the land well and used what he was given.”

The first three holes of the front nine at Poland Spring are wide open, something Fahey said is a trademark of Ross courses. The fourth hole, however, is where things start to get interesting.

“It’s so typical of his style,” Fahey said. “You can bang away at the first three holes, but it tightens up really fast. On the fourth and fifth holes, you have to take the shots you are given, and you can’t force things or you’ll be in trouble.”

The fourth hole is a 400-yard par-4 straight down a narrow hill, set between two clusters of forest. A straight drive is required, but with the slope, and as the fairways harden as the summer rolls on, an iron is probably a pretty safe play. The second shot is into a green sloped front to back, another Ross trademark, along with his habit of using optical illusions to test golfers.

“If you look at some of the greens, they look like they slope pretty severely,” Fahey said. “The reality is, sometimes, they are built into a hill, like on the fourth, and they only seem to be sloped when they really are flat.”

The fifth hole adds more optical fun, as the tee is set back in a grove of trees, aimed directly at another patch of forest. The hole is only 300 yards long, but the way the tree line is shaped, it feels more like 400. Playing a wood off the tee is a common mistake.

“If you can hit the ball 150 yards twice, you are on the green,” Fahey said. “It gives you the misconception that you need to hit a big drive, but two shots with your 150-yard club will do just fine.”

Newer is older

During the next five to seven years, Fahey hopes to recreate the course to fit its original design.

In the past couple of years, maps have surfaced of the course as it was originally built. One of the more useful maps shows the course in 1915, and Fahey is able to compare it to an aerial picture from 1939. The changes in just 24 years are dramatic.

“In the 30s, as more people started going back to work, and then right after that when (World War II) started, there was a shortage of manpower,” Fahey said. “It took a lot of manpower to maintain the grounds the way they were, so they let some of the features go.”

On the seventh hole, Fahey has uncovered one such feature and has redesigned the hole to it the original mold. Now, instead of wide open rough on the left side of the fairway, there is thick grass, called gorse, surrounding five pot bunkers in a line.

“Some members have asked me why I went and did that,” Fahey said. “The reason we did it is not to penalize golfers, per se, but to bring back the original feel of the course, which set out to penalize golfers that missed badly.”

Other changes at the course have included planting some pine trees between some of the holes, not only for aesthetics, but for safety. Those, according to Fahey, are likely to stay.

Still, the winds of change seem to be blowing again at Poland Spring, and change will most likely mean a more classic feel to a course that is the only course left in Maine with velvet greens, the oldest resort course in the state, and one of the oldest Donald Ross designs on record.