Disused Grootvlei Golf Course

The Grootvlei Golf Course sits on the edge of one of South Africa's most storied — and now largely vanished — mining communities. Grootvlei, a small settlement in the eastern reaches of Gauteng's border with Mpumalanga, grew up around the Grootvlei Proprietary Mines, a gold-mining operation whose fortunes rose and fell across the 20th century. Like countless mining-company courses built across southern Africa during that era, this layout existed to serve the recreational needs of mine workers and management, a social institution as much as a sporting one. When the mine wound down, the community that sustained the course wound down with it.

The surrounding highveld landscape is characteristically flat and open, sitting at altitude on the broad grassland plateau that defines this part of South Africa — firm, fast conditions in dry winter months, softer and lusher after the summer rains.

The course is now disused, its fate a quiet monument to the mining towns that once dotted this region. For the record, it existed.