With its lofty rankings, design pedigree and a devoted international following, Cape Kidnappers – which celebrates its 10th birthday this month – remains one of the most photographed and talked about courses on the planet.

It's also surprisingly “difficult to classify”, says the man behind the incredible design, Tom Doak.

It was Doak who laid out the fabled fingers of fairway, which dodge menacing ravines on either side and skirt the Cape's signature chalk-white cliffs, which rise more than 400 feet from the shores of Hawkes Bay.

Doak credits the Cape Kidnappers project with launching his career a decade ago.

Just don't ask him to define exactly what sort of course Cape Kidnappers is.

"To me the key with Cape Kidnappers is that it's just different from everywhere else," said Doak. “I wouldn't describe it as a links. Seaside? Yes. But links? No. It's not sandy... I think of classic links courses as being really bumpy, with uneven fairways, which Cape Kidnappers doesn't have at all. I hesitate to use the word 'heathland', as I think of the courses around London with heather all over them. I would love to build a golf course in terrain like that some day ... but Cape Kidnappers isn't that.

"We've now built four or five golf courses next to the ocean, and two or three more overlooking huge bodies of water … but Cape Kidnappers is different from those -- because of the setting, so high up on the cliffs; because it's not sandy and bumpy. Everybody thinks that sandy, bumpy links courses are the end-all, be-all of golf, and I kind of do, too, in some ways. But there are a lot of those golf courses.

“When you build a new one, you have to compare it back to St. Andrews and Sandwich and Royal Birkdale and all the great links in the British Isles. There is nothing in the British Isles like Cape Kidnappers -- nothing anywhere like Cape Kidnappers. That's why it's so cool."

Tom Doak commentates here on his two favourite holes at Cape Kidnappers

THE PAR-4 7TH

THE PAR-4 12TH