Castle Creek Adventure Land - Salem, MA
EXECUTIVE SUMMARY
Score: 69/100
Would we play this course again? No.
Should you play this course? Yes.
The Takeaway: Castle Creek Adventure Land draws you in with promising curb appeal and proceeds to somewhat halfheartedly check most of the boxes of adventure-style mini golf with a castle, cannons, dyed-blue waterfalls and a cave hole; some of these boxes it checks better than others. Situated atop a hill with very little shade, the sun pummels you into submission here and the greens are fast and unforgiving: on some holes missing a couple inches to the right or left may send your ball rolling slowly, then quickly all the way back to the starting mat. While not earning a glowing review (perhaps we were spoiled, coming here right after the quirky and enjoyable, albeit very different Hago Harrington’s course), this is a decent enough course so if you live nearby it’s probably best to visit here and make up your own mind, preferably on a cool or cloudy day.
The view from the entrance to Castle Creek
TECHNICAL REVIEW
Castle Creek Adventure Land features an 18-hole outdoor mini golf course situated on a small hill on the outskirts of Salem, and includes a go-kart track behind the course. As we pulled into the largely empty dirt parking lot at the base of the hill, we felt a palpable sense of childlike wonder and anticipation. The castle up on the course stars as the main attraction here, standing out clearly from the parking lot view. From here you can see the greens in the distance, nestled among the rocks and shrubs, and observe parties out on the course seemingly enjoying their day.
A quality entrance booth that also serves up snacks
The entrance building looks the part too, done up like a castle complete with turrets and battlements. And this is a castle that serves ice cream and hot dogs (the best kind of castle, albeit it poorly suited for Middle Ages combat). It did not go unnoticed that the castle was employing multiple personnel at the same time, a reassuring sign that ownership remains invested in the overall operation and care of the course.
The course itself zig-zags its way around the hill, up near the castle, along a meandering river, and then finishing down near the footbridge that leads to the parking lot. In general it runs with a loose nautical/pirate theme (with a castle thrown in). One hole has an anchor to contend with, on others there was a cannon, cannon balls, and a treasure chest too. Only a couple of holes did not have an obstruction or major elevation change that affected the direction of your putt (that’s bound to happen when you are located mostly on a hill).
There’s not doubt about it, this is a deceptively challenging course. Partially by design, partially not. The greens are fast and unforgiving. They’re an odd dirty dark color as well; whether this is due to accumulated grime or is specific to the type of turf used here is unknown. On the first hole we received our welcome that this would be a course to contend with when the very first shot missed the cup, bounced off the back wall, and ever so gradually rolled all the way back to the tee box. Lesson learned (while the video cuts off a bit early, take a look at this clip below and know that this baby rolls all the way back).
Point being, you’ll want to dial in your feel quickly here, or risk a very lousy round.
Thankfully, this course gets many of the fundamentals right. The greens are free of rips and tears. The brickwork borders are generally sturdy and intact with no gaps. Unfortunately they do use putting mats, which are often bolted down at all four corners which can limit your ball aiming path. Some of these mats have lips at the front which is not good at all, as shown in the video above.
The holes generally flow nicely from one to the next, but something about the nature of the individual holes themselves feels a bit scattered. As if during construction a large box of props arrived at the construction trailer at 2 pm on a Friday, and the jobsite superintendant directed a tired laborer to “put ‘em out there.” But some props got lost during shipping, so said laborer scrounged up a couple non-pirate props (e.g. a rock) and worked them into the course because he was just trying to close out the punch-list item for “Install prop on Hole 2” and go home.
Still though, the landscaping is pleasant and well-looked after, even if not much has grown up high enough yet to provide much needed shade. And there are some fun holes. There is a long sweeping downhill where you must navigate around or under a cannon is a nice longer hole (this is a different cannon hole than the one pictured below). And the little multi-tiered, ramp over the water on Hole 10 is a cute one. The cave hole too is a nice box to check, and a welcome source of some shade.
This brings us back to a prominent issue with the greens, which is that it’s one thing to hit a put too hard and bounce it right back to the tee box, it’s another to miss a 3-foot putt by a couple inches and have it roll 15 feet back to the starting mat (as happened on the cave hole…as you try to do the calculus in your head of how this could possibly be happening it is already too late). We’d attribute some aspect of this to design, but also due mainly to construction, with certain sags and runs in the greens tending to scatter your ball off to some far off destination. Sometimes it felt like sinking even a 2-foot putt relied on primarily luck. So if you’re playing with a 5-year old (or these two reviewers) beware that you may be in for a very long day.
As can often be the case at mini golf courses, many holes tended to funnel the ball away towards the edges, pinning you against the brickwork perimeter (which is generally nicely done and consistent as mentioned earlier). When two very different shots funnel to the exact same lie on multiple holes, it kind be annoying. Again, this is a pretty common occurrence in mini golfing and we always take a one clubhead move off the rails, but it’s still worth mentioning for review purposes.
Back to the course, it closes strong with the 17th which is a longer multi-tiered hole with a large anchor to confound your putting, and then a proper 18th hole (not a simple ball return non-hole 18th hole so often seen). And so it was that we beat a hasty retreat from the castle to tally our scorecard in the dusty parking lot before driving away for more mini golf at Planet X.
APPENDIX
The challenge with an adventure-type course is that you have to go big: you have to sweep patrons up and take them on a journey, immersing them in a feast for the senses with inviting terrain, alluring sights, a cultivated palette of colors, a pleasing soundscape, and even intoxicating aromas too if possible (interestingly they must have just laid manure on the landscaping when we visited because it was a little ripe smelling, though this isn’t a something they can rightly be criticized for).
Thus, a little pile of cannonballs scattered next to a hole just doesn’t cut it. And so it is that despite the large and highly visible castle on the hill, for which we presume Castle Creek is named, something about this course feels small and underwhelming.
This is a course that has you giddy as you pay your fee at the castle shack and then eagerly trot across the footbridge to begin your 18 holes. But rather than going on the adventure we all want to take and storming said castle, it feels instead like we are assigned to a side quest that amounts to kicking around the peasant town just outside the castle walls trying to barter our way into possession of something inexplicably mundane, like a chair, or a rock.
This course does have the bones (in the parlance of HGTV) of a good course, with sweeping elevation changes, pleasing water features, and some challenging hole configurations, but ultimately it feels like it could be improved by discarding any trace of an adventure theme and instead focusing on these positives along with some of the nice landscaping. Of course removing the castle would necessitate a name change, and would probably put a damper on business without the roadside allure, so really this is terrible (and unsolicited) advice and anyone reading this would do well to print this review out, crumple it up, and blast it out of any one of the number of cannons that dot this course (if those cannons actually worked, which they do not, which is our chief complaint about every miniature golf course with a cannon).