The golf world’s attention was drawn to the west coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island a few years back when word spread about the development of a second course. There were two good reasons for this. The first was that it would be designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who’ve given us some of the world’s best new courses in the last 30 years. The second (and probably the reason for the first) is that people saw pictures of the absolutely spectacular dunes-and-cliffs site. Not only was there the potential for holes that could rival the cliffside holes at Cypress Point, the site also afforded the opportunity to create some stunning and unique inland holes.

While the cliffside holes are extraordinary as advertised (I’ll say plenty about the now-famous 16th and 17th), the variety of landscapes on this property is an incredible strength and the routing takes advantage of it. There’s a long stretch of coastline and the routing returns to it at several points. There’s also a section of the property with sand dunes next to an inland lake, which we play through twice. The rest of the property is a hilly transition area between the dunes and the forest through which the course weaves in and out. The routing changes direction on almost every hole, which keeps you on your toes, but also prevents you from experiencing the multi-hole beatdown into the wind that you often experience on out-and-back-routed links courses.

So the landscape offers incredible variety and the routing takes advantage of it. The design features one additional element that adds to the variety: an unusual mix of 6 par 3s, 6 par 4s, and 6 par 5s. I’m a bit less convinced about the merits of this. I suppose that par doesn’t really matter and regardless of the wind, a few of these par 5s will play like long (or not even that long) par 4s. Still, I think that the course could use two or three more strong par 4s and stretches of consecutive par 4s that differ from each other. The only consecutive par 4s here are holes two and three.

While the greens contours are similar to those next door in that they’re interesting but not over-the-top, the green surroundings here are quite a bit more challenging. There are several steep run-offs around these greens and in a good wind—which I experienced in both rounds I played and would imagine is quite common—they can be very difficult to hit. And missing can lead to some serious trouble. I suppose that the green complexes here were likely to end up a bit more severe than next door simply because the land is a lot hillier and many green sites needed to be built into heavily sloped areas. Still, I think that a few of the green complexes here could have been toned down a bit, given both the wind and the firmness of the course in the summer.


As on a lot of spectacular courses, the first hole isn’t too spectacular. From the back tees, it’s a very long 580 yard par 5, especially when playing right into the wind. There isn’t too much trouble between the tee and the green, save for one fairway bunker encroaching into the left side of the fairway about 110 yards short of the green and another about 25 yards short.

Continuing southwest into the wind is the stunning 390 yard par 4 second. This gets many people’s nod as the best hole at Cabot Cliffs and for good reason: it’s a unique hole both in its setting and how the hole is shaped into it. We play downhill into a very wide and fairly flat sandy coastal plain. The approach is over a creek that flows out to the sea up into the sand dunes. The green, which is fronted by bunkers carved into a sand dune, is sort-of triangle-shaped, with a wide, lower portion at the front and a narrower, high one at the back.

Now there are options off the tee here which are dictated by the hole location. The left side of the green is blind from all but the left side of the fairway. And the right side of the green is blind from all but the right. So you want to be on the same side of the fairway as the pin, which you can see from the tee, maybe with the assistance of your range finder…unless you are or have the vision of a pilot. While it’s not too hard to place your drive in the middle of this fairway, you have to negotiate the junk along the left or right edge of the fairway to get it into the optimal spot. The wind was blowing a bit too hard for me to be confident enough to try this and I was just happy to hit the fairway.

But it’s a very interesting concept and I think it works well. Wherever you drive it, make sure that you carry your approach up onto the green; if you miss the left side short, you can roll all the way back down into the junk. I suspect that this hole wouldn’t be so hard without wind, but I’m not sure how many are lucky enough to experience that.

The similar length third features a bunker in the middle of the fairway right where you’d want to drive the ball. But it’s probably worth challenging because the green is perched up and a hill with a pretty steep fall-off to the right. You want to make sure that you have a manageable length for your second.

The par 3 fourth has two greens; one on the left that plays over 200 yards and one on the right that plays about 150. The shorter one is clearly the most dangerous. While there’s ample room (even if you can’t see it) short and right of the first green, you must be super-accurate if playing to the second or there’s a decent chance that you’ll go back-and-forth across the green with the next few. There’s more room at the back than the front but you still need a high degree of accuracy. While it isn’t the most exciting hole, I prefer the left green.

While the second is a bit of a subtly great driving hole, the short par 4 fifth is an obviously great one. The scorecard lists it at 330 yards…but that’s aiming at the green and you need about a 300 carry to make that work.

The rest of us get to pick our comfort level with a diagonal carry up to the right and the hole plays more like 360-390 depending on which line we choose.. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen such a cape style drive where the shot varies so much depending on which line you pick. There’s open fairway well out to the right, but you can probably only go about 200 yards on this line unless you hit a good hook. Then there’s a more uphill carry of about 210 yards over a bunker which in a left-to-right wind is probably the most sensible for most of us. This line would be dangerous for a long hitter because the fairway runs out at about 250-265. They’ll need to go somewhere to the left (it’s about 265 over the bunker short and right of the green), but the fairway is very shallow on the other side.

While the green is large and not particularly interesting, the drive is one of the best that I’ve seen anywhere. I’m fortunate in that the line over the first bunker is just the right carry for me because there isn’t a lot of room for a long hitter to play left of that, unless they can go for the green. Still, they could always lay up to the right and as usual, that’d probably be best for the scorecard…if less fun.

The fifth green also brings us into the sand dunes where we find the entire par 3 sixth. This is a fantastic short hole which looks more punishing than it is, but also ends up being a bit harder than you think it should be once you see what's going on. That’s because the green is large and there’s plenty of room to miss short (you might even be able to putt from the front tees), but it also slopes away and it’s difficult to get it close, unless the pin is in the bowl at the back-right.

We play back away from the ocean into the endless Canadian wilderness on the par 5 seventh. But this is another very good driving hole, where you can get in range with a bold carry up the right side…or run out of space and into the junk up the left. There’s not a lot to say about the rest of the hole but make sure that you carry your approach far enough.

The next two holes, another par 5 and a par 3 are a bit of a weak point. Eight is a solid driving hole where you can get close to the green in two if you pick a bold line off the tee but again, the rest of the shots aren’t that interesting. Then we have an awkward walk of about 150 yards up around the first green and the second tee to a downhill par 3 that plays all of 120 yards. It’s a pet peeve of mine to have a walk from a green to a tee that’s longer than that next hole and this one, while similar in concept, is inferior to the fourteenth hole next door. But at least it’s just as beautiful.

The next hole, a long par 5 with the ocean all the way down the left, was one of my favorites despite two incredibly disappointing attempts at playing it. First of all, I just love the look of the short grass along the edge of the cliff. But for most of the landing area, there are bunkers ‘protecting’ you from running over the cliff. More of an issue for me was a cluster of bunkers about 280 down the right side. This hole is downwind with the prevailing wind and it’s a challenge to fit one between the cliff right and the bunker cluster left.

It’s quite possible to go for the green if you hit a good one because it can roll out forever—one of my playing partners’ drives went about 400 yards. But if you’re laying up, you must be careful to stay well short of the inlet about 60 yards short of the green. It’s all downhill and downwind, so you need to lay back further than you think.

The par 4 eleventh takes us back uphill and inland, past the new vacation homes of Sydney Crosby and other Canadian elites. It’s pretty easy to tell what you should do here—hug the bunker right because the hilltop green opens up on that side. It’s best to err short here because you want no part of what’s over the green.

While the 200+ yard (up to 245) looks straight-forward enough, I found it baffling to play. You can’t really run one onto the green here because the land slopes away to the left. And there was almost no way to land one on the green and hold it there given the wind direction (down) and the firm ground. I’d be interested to try to play some shots around the right side of the bunker, but in addition to there not being much room to do this, it didn’t look like there was enough tilt toward the green. But then again, I suppose short and left isn’t too bad.

Thirteen is a bit of a breather hole with plenty of width and a much more receptive green, if you carry the rise in front of it.

Fourteen is a simple-looking ~160 yard par 3…but it didn’t play simple. The issue here again was that the green was so firm that it was difficult to carry on and hold it there.

The four hole run home immediately became famous when the course opened and for good reason. The par 5 fifteenth is a thrill. The main feature is a bunker in the middle of the fairway, which requires about a 260 carry from the tips. I suppose that you’re offered a good view of the green if you keep your drive in the area left of it…but none of us was bold enough to try to hit it there.

Carry it or miss it a bit right and your ball will run well down the fairway (at least with the standard down wind), possibly to a career long drive. From here you’ll have a blind shot that asks only one question: can you carry a centerline bunker 50 yards short of the center of the green? If yes, pick a club that can just carry that and go for it. If not, lay well back. You probably can’t hold the green with your second, but the bunkers behind the green aren’t too bad.

The par 3 sixteenth is just extraordinary. If you’re trying to keep a score together—which I was in my second round—it’s one of the most terrifying shots that you’ll ever see. But it was, to this point, the single most spectacular.

There’s some room to bail out short and left, but it’ll be very difficult to keep your pitch on the upper left side of the green from here. If the flag is on the precipice at the right side of the green, your score would probably be better off if you played over here and pitched on, although I could understand why no one would ever do that. You didn’t come all this way and pay all this money not to try that shot.

The only shot that I’ve ever seen that might outdo the tee shot on sixteen is the tee shot from the tips on seventeen. I can hardly imagine a more difficult-looking shot, uphill and over a massive cliff, with no view of the landing area. I moved up a set of tees from where I could at least see a little of the fairway.

If you’re a long hitter, the best way to play the hole is to bomb one along the cliff. While into the wind, it’s only between a 200 and 240 yard carry depending on the line and if you carry even part of the cliff, your ball will likely bound forward near the green. For those of us who don’t hit a long ball and are too scared to try this shot, there’s plenty of room out to the left (and, helpfully, a spotter).

But unless the pin is in the back of the green, the approach off a layup is very tough, unless you can put a lot of spin on the ball, your wedge approach will roll out to the back of the green. Alternatively, you can get clever and play a bump-and-run around the bunker on the left—the land here is contoured to feed the ball onto the green. If you pull it off just right, I think you can keep it on the front of the green. But it’d take some experimentation to make that work. Just hit one up on the green, make your 4, and go to the next tee.

It’s a puzzling hole if you layup but I think that’s because it’s meant to heavily favor those who go for the green and pull it off. Given the shot required to do that, I have no problem with it. This is one of the greatest short par 4s that I've seen.

The par 5 eighteenth is a bit of a mirror image of the tenth, but of course plays much longer because it’s into the wind. Like ten, you need to fit one between bunkers and ocean—a fade off the left bunkers would work great.

​The approach is similar too except this time, you need to be able to carry within about 90 yards of the center of the green to carry the cove. Otherwise you might want to play out to the left because you’ll be a long way back if you lay up short. It’s always best to err a bit short here because the green narrows its back.

I mentioned in my review of Cabot Links that the starter there told me that people’s preferences split about 50/50 between Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs. That was before I had played Cabot Cliffs and I was surprised because Cabot Cliffs looked much more spectacular. And it is. But after playing it, I think I can understand why many prefer Cabot Links. Unless the wind is down, this is a much harder course than Cabot Links. There are more opportunities for lost balls and the green complexes are more difficult.

It was also windier here both days than at Cabot Links. Now we played both morning rounds there and both afternoon rounds here and I can’t rule out that it just got more windy in the afternoon. But much of Cabot Cliffs is more than 75 feet above sea level while Cabot Links is just 15-30 feet above and I suspect that it’s usually more windy here. Cabot Cliffs is plenty wide enough to handle the wind but the combination of the wind and the steeper slopes throughout the course make it much more difficult to control the ball here. Still, the course record is much lower here than at Cabot Links (60 here vs. I think 65 or 66 for Cabot Links) so the course isn’t always more difficult.

As far as judging the courses, it would come down to how you weigh the importance of the spectacular vs. the subtle. This property afforded Coore and Crenshaw some spectacular opportunities and there’s no doubt that they took advantage of them. Cabot Links simply has nothing to compare to the sixteenth or seventeenth holes. I'm not sure that any architects could have done a better job with the extraordinary moments on the property than Coore and Crenshaw did.

But there’s not a lot like the little humps and bumps that you find around the greens at Cabot Links. I loved the shaping on and especially around the greens at Cabot Links and am always especially impressed when architects are able to create something really interesting on modest land. So I think I give the nod to Cabot Links. But I'm also not sure that you could have done that here--this property is quite hilly while Cabot Links is mostly gently rolling or flat. There were always going to have to be some pretty big slopes around these greens. I suppose the challenge here was the opposite; yes you can build a lot of spectacular-looking holes, but can you keep them from being too severe?

I think that Coore and Crenshaw succeeded in building a course that isn't too severe and you have to give them a lot of credit for that. I can think of a few highly regarded living architects who may have let things get a bit out of control on this property. The merit of something is not determined just by what it does and does well, but what it doesn’t do and could have done badly. Being a perfect 10 for beauty doesn't hurt either.

While everyone on the Golf Channel constantly talks of growing the game, my feeling since a few months after the beginning of Covid has been that the game has grown too much. Whereas for the previous 10-15 years, you could call your favorite local course on Friday afternoon and book a prime Saturday morning tee time, now you have to get your plans together and make the reservation a week in advance. I guess the growth of the game is good for the equipment makers and the course operators, but it hasn’t been great for those of us who had been benefitting from its slow decline.
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Nowhere has the new, over-popularity of golf struck me more than when I tried to book a reservation at Cabot in January 2022 for July 2022. While I figured that it wouldn’t be possible to book a large reservation only six months in advance, I was only making the reservation for two, my Michigan golf buddy Bob and me. Now you have to book lodging to book golf more than a few weeks in advance and all they had for the two of us was one Saturday night in the entire month of July. Fortunately Bob and I were flexible so we took it and built our Cape Breton golf trip around that, adding (the previously chronicled) Highland Links, the (surprisingly good) Lakes near Sydney, and (the somewhat disappointing) Bulls Bay in the lovely small town of Baddeck.


So that’s enough about the logistics of booking Cabot…just do it well in advance. How was the place itself. If you’ve been to Sand Valley or Bandon, the vibes will be quite familiar. Unlike those, the main Cabot facilities are in the town of Inverness so there are other dining options and other things to do just outside of the Cabot Parking lot. And like Bandon and especially Sand Valley, the resort’s main building are very attractive, blending nicely into their dunes-and-seaside landscape. Also like Bandon and Sand Valley, the rooms and dining are excellent, with many of the latter, including ours overlooking the approach to the eighteenth green.

And also like Bandon and Sand Valley, the courses are excellent. They feel a little bit closer to Bandon than Sand Valley because they’re on the seaside and the terrain is a bit more reminiscent of the former. This is especially true for Cabot Links which of all of the courses at the three resorts, feels most like a traditional links course. While there’s some elevation change across the property, much of the interest here is in the smaller scale contours of the ground, which reminded me a lot of a traditional links course. It’s especially impressive because my understanding is that a lot of these small contours were created by the architect Ron Whitten and his shapers. The shaping on and around the greens is some of the best that I’ve seen on a new course, ranging from subtle to dramatic, with both in sensible proportions. Too many new course lean toward the latter too often.

The big question about Cabot is ‘which of the courses did you prefer?’ and the starter here told me—to my surprise—that it’s about 50/50. I was expecting that people heavily favored Cabot Cliffs, which is on a much more dramatic piece of property and has several spectacular holes. But after playing both twice, I think that the answer might reflect well on the people who come here. Yes Cabot Cliffs is more spectacular, but I think that the detail work on Cabot Links is better. There’s nothing too dramatic about almost any hole here, yet the placement of the bunkering and the shaping on and around the greens makes for consistently interesting shots. While it’s close, I’d give the nod to Cabot Links as well.


The ~540 par 5 first is an almost perfect start. There’s plenty of room out to the right but if you’re someone who could maybe reach such a hole in 2, you’ll have to skirt the big bunker on the left. And you’ll also have to skirt your approach past two bunkers that narrow the fairway about 60 yards short of the green. But there’s plenty of room to miss left once you’re past them.

I knew that I was going to like the course when I saw the shaping left of the first green. This is the degree of shaping that I wish we’d see more on new courses—enough to make shots from over here tricky, but not creating an all-or-nothing scenario where if you miss slightly, you go back and forth. It worked especially well with the (very) firm turf that we had.

The second is a ~220 yard par 3 with a moderately Biarritz green and plenty of room to run the ball on up the left side. If you miss a bit right however, the contour of the land will take your ball further away in that direction. Another example of modest, yet very effective shaping.

The course turns it up a bit on the short par 4 third, which has junk all the way up the right and a sandy mound in the left-center of the fairway about 205 yards out. Most could easily carry this but the issue is that if you drive it up the left side, away from the junk, your approach to the green will be obscured by another mound at its front-left. The green is large and modestly contoured and while you can come at most of it from an awkward distance up the left side, I think it’s best to just play something short and right of the mound and hit a wedge on.

Four, a par 4 of 450 yards up a hill, might be the most difficult hole on the course. It starts with one of the most difficult drives. There are staggered fairway bunkers, first 230 up the left, then 265 up the right. There’s another at about 315 in the middle if that’s relevant for you. You also want to be up the left side here because the green angles from front-left to back-right and has deep fronting bunkers. But there’s also plenty of open space and some possibly helpful contours at the front-left if you’re a long way out and want to run your ball up onto the green.

It’s a bit of a change of scenery for the next two holes, but one that nevertheless feels appropriate. We play slightly downhill into the bushes on the mid-length par 3 fifth. While you can see the trouble on the right, you can’t see as easily that if you stay inside the junk up the left, the ball will kick onto the green. So it’s probably best to aim slightly left here…but not too much.

The long par 4 sixth, doglegging left around a lake with a small fishing village in the background, is often considered the course’s best hole. While I’m not sure that I’d agree, it’s certainly a very good one. It looks like a cape hole, but it really doesn’t play like one because unless you can carry it about 290, you can’t carry any of the pond. And I don’t think that there’s really any advantage, except a few less yards, to driving it near the pond. Just hit something safe up the mowed path.

The approach is without a doubt one of the course’s best looking, and it’s also interesting in the course’s characteristic subtle way. There’s plenty of room to run the ball on but everything slopes gradually left, toward a nasty trench bunker left of the green. This approach might not be too hard if the course were soft, but we had to be very careful in firm conditions, especially with a left pin.

The course’s one clunky walk is the 175 yards across a road from the sixth to the seventh although I can’t imagine anyone complaining too much. This slightly downhill par 3 looks like the coast of Scotland or Ireland. And again, the shaping on and around the green is subtle and superb; there’s plenty of room short and the deeper you go, the less room you have with runoffs into hollows and bunkers. It looks modest but with firm conditions, it’s just right.

Eight is another long par 5 which is also made by subtlety on and around the green. The first task is about a 215 yard carry over junk and you’ll want to hedge a bit right because the carry is longer the further left you go.

The second is blind over some bunkers on the left which shouldn’t be too much trouble because they end 150 yards short of the green. And save for some junk way right, the approach to the green is wide open.

Yet it’s critical to play your approach up the left side because the green, while open in front, has a large swale between it and the shared thirteenth green to the right. If the pin is anywhere on the left side of the green—which appeared to be most of the pinnable area—it’s a very awkward approach over the swale to the narrowest aspect of the green if you’ve laid up to the right side. It’s much more straight-forward if you’re up the left. So it’s another hole where knowing what’s going on around the green influences how you should play it.

The ~360 yard ninth is much busier looking from the tee, but is probably one of the easier drives once you know what’s going on. Unless you can carry the centerline bunker and get near the green, you’ll never have much of a view on the approach. So the best drive is just well out to the right, short of the cluster of bunkers at about 280.

Another shortish par 4, the tenth is a bit intimidating from the tee but I found it to be one of the easiest holes on the course. The principle feature is the hill of bunkers up the right, but this was only about a 215 yard carry (downwind) and it’s wide open on the other side. Unless the flag is in the back-left, most of the green is accessible from anywhere on or around the fairway.

Eleven is another long, but interesting par 5 (the 580 yard green tees were plenty enough). The landing area is wide although everything slides right so you have to be careful about missing right.

The real interest is on the second. There’s a small bunker in the middle of the fairway about 90 yards short of the middle of the green, a massive area of fairway left of it and a small ledge right. As you might expect, you’ll have a much better view of the green from the right. The best play here is something at the bunker that can’t reach it because your ball should feed to the right. But if you pull it slightly, it’ll catch the wrong side of the slope and feed left, from where you’ll have a completely blind shot. Yet another hole that isn’t too visually dramatic, but is very thoughtful.

Twelve is a tough 450 yard par 4, especially because it was playing straight into the wind. But the hole is well-designed for this, with plenty of room off the tee and on the approach.

Thirteen is about the same length but playing the opposite direction—which meant a gap wedge rather than a 2-hybrid approach for me. The drive is blind but the fairway is wide open as long as you can keep it short of a bunker about 340 out (I almost didn’t). The approach is uphill to a double green (shared with no. 8) that’s easily the most heavily contoured on the course.

After that, we climb a hill to the highest point on the course to play its shortest hole: a downhill 90 yarder to a big green. Sounds easy, right? It isn’t. With the wind coming hard from the left, you have to aim at the left side of the green and hope that you don’t hit it too solidly and go through the wind. It’s easy to get one carry the wind and ending up down the hill to the right, as I learned from my playing partners.

The closing four holes, two downwind along the beach and two inland back into it, are among the course’s strongest. I think that the 415 yard fifteenth might be both the best of the bunch and the course’s best hole. The drive is similar to eight, although much prettier because you can see the beach.

It’s also much more important to hug the left side than it is on eight because the green is narrow but deep and has a bunker at it’s front-right, making an approach from the left side of the fairway much easier than one from the right. While the green is a bit wider in the back, it’s a tough approach shot regardless of where you are. Accuracy is critical.

Sixteen is another beauty although one with a much tougher drive. There are two bunker in the fairway about 270 out and it’s tough to stay short of them downwind with firm ground. Also, the hole is 460 yards, so there’s some temptation to get your drive a bit closer to the green. But this green is also well-designed for an approach from long range, being open across the front and having contours that allow you to run the ball onto the green from the right. Another excellent hole.

We turn back inland for the last two holes which may be less dramatic, but are almost as good. Seventeen was only playing about a 140 yards, but it was one of the longest 140 yards that I’ve seen. There’s some room over the front bunker and it’s best to hedge a bit short here because the green narrows to the back.

Although it’s quite tough, the long par 4 eighteenth is one of my favorite finishers. I find the up-and-over drive quite pleasing and much easier than the approach, which you have to thread between bunkers right and the restaurant and maybe your hotel room left. After a perfect drive, I reminded myself why hitting the ball too solidly in the wind is a problem as I nailed my 4-iron right at the middle of the green…never to be seen again.

The best approach here is something running at the left side as the ground runs away from a large dune (into which the restaurant is built on the other side) and onto the green. The green has some of the course’s heaviest contours at its left side.

I’m writing this review about four months after I played Cabot Links but only a week after returning from Bandon, so that obviously invites a comparison between them. Now Bandon as a place is obviously better because there are more courses and it’s really no harder to get to. But while I think I’d have Cabot Links behind Pacific Dunes and Bandon Trails, it compares very favorably to Bandon Dunes and Old MacDonald. It reminds me a bit of both, but in a softer, more subtle. The oceanside holes aren’t as dramatic as those on Bandon Dunes, but they’re probably just as interesting when you get into the details. And like Old MacDonald, there’s a mix of subtle and dramatic, but I think that the subtle is done a bit better here.

And as I mentioned in the intro, the latter is the real strength of Cabot Links. The shaping on and especially around the greens is as good as any new course that I’ve seen. There’s plenty of challenge, but it’s never overdone. There are always better and worse places to miss and the former are always large enough to make them a reasonable play--which is emphatically not true on several of the well-known new courses.

For the most part, Cabot Links might be the least visually spectacular of the Mike Kaiser stable of courses, but it’s definitely not one of the weakest (Sheep Ranch is definitely at the bottom, then probably Mammoth Dunes as much as I like it). Hole-for-hole, there’s a lot of interest here, although a lot of it would be stuff that you’d miss if you’re driving around drinking beer in a cart (which you can’t do) or are focused too much on a match. This is definitely a course where you want to spend a lot of time looking at the ground because as beautiful as the ocean and sand dunes are, Cabot Links’ greatest strength is what Ron Whitten and his team did around your feet.

For the Canadian golfer, pride in the work of architect Stanley Thompson stands alongside of a love of hockey and penchant for saying ‘eh’ as a national trait. Thompson’s famous ‘mountains and ocean’ course is perhaps his most famous and is a perennial member of the top 10 Canadian courses—having also spent a good amount of time at #1. The course is situated in the 200,000+ acre Cape Breton Highlands National Park which, despite its remote location at the northern end of the northernmost island of Nova Scotia, appears to be on most Canadians’ radar as a top summer destination.

Now the park itself and the beautiful Keltic Lodge hotel on a rocky peninsula jutting out into the ocean are certainly a big part of the draw, but I get the sense that the course is of almost equal billing. It’s a national landmark and we encountered golfers from all over Canada. All were familiar with the course’s renown and several mentioned that it was designed by Stanley Thompson, Canada’s most famous architect (they also all said ‘eh’ and talked about hockey). While the course has always been a remote outpost of Canadian golf, it’s become a much more justifiable trip with the development of Cabot only about an hour-and-a-half to the south. You can fly into Sydney airport from Toronto or Montreal, play the nearby Lakes at Ben Eoin (very good) and/or Baddeck Bay (not as good but still nice) as a warm-up and then out to the coast of Cape Breton Island for what’s become Canada’s top golf destination.

Highland Links has always been one of the courses that I was most interested in seeing in the world because it seems so different from other top courses. Pictures make it seem like an adventure through very different, but equally spectacular landscapes—from the sea’s edge, through rolling meadows, into and then back out of deep mountain forests. And that aspect of it did not disappoint; with the exception of not having a hole on the actual coast of the ocean (just ocean-adjacent ponds), this course goes through as many different types of environments as any I’ve seen. I’m an avid hiker and if there weren’t a golf course here, it would be one of the more memorable hikes that I’ve done. Thompson loved the variety that this property offered and he took advantage of it. I didn’t have the time to go hiking while I was up there but I think that walking two rounds on this course did the job, both in terms of seeing what the park had to offer and degree of difficulty.

Getting into the design of the course, the variety of landscapes is obviously a strength. There are many different types of beautiful holes here, running through meadows (1 and 18), along coastal ponds (3, 6) up and down through mountain valleys (7-9) and alongside mountain streams (11-12). The other strengths of the course are (1) how well Thompson used the terrain on each of the individual holes and (2) the outstanding green contours. Other than perhaps St. George’s Hill, I’ve never seen a course where the contours in the fairway play such an important role in how you want to drive the ball. And I wasn’t prepared for the greens contouring, which is a fantastic mix of bold and subtle and whose variety almost matches the variety in the landscape.

Highland Links does have a few drawbacks. The middle holes (9-12) are weak. And there’s about a 400 yard walk between the twelfth and thirteenth hole that I don’t understand. But the opening stretch has as many excellent holes and as much variety as you could want. The closing stretch, while not quite matching either of these points, is also very good and presents some good opportunities to score if you’ve gotten lost in the woods a few times up to this point.


Despite its very wide fairway, the 400 yard first is one of the toughest holes here. It probably plays about 40 ft. uphill, the fairway is as contoured as most links courses (that’ll be a feature of several other holes too), and the green has both a false front and wild interior contours. Plus it plays straight to the west, so into the prevailing wind. Uphill holes are always a good test of solid ball striking but this one throws in a few more testing elements. Not a gentle handshake to start, but certainly playable enough.

While not far from the first hole, you start to get a good sense of the variety in store with the second, which looks completely different. This is a par 4 of about 450 yards, doglegging right and running downhill. It important to hit a solid drive because there isn’t much run in the fairways. But a fade is also important because it’s easy to hit on into the trees on the left if you take a bit too safe of a line. Hugging the right tree line is the thing to do here.

Even if you pull off a great drive, there’s plenty of challenge remaining. The green is bunkerless…but is one of the two most severely contoured on the course. The primary feature is a high right shoulder, plenty large enough for a pin placement. That’s where the pin was on our first day and…it didn’t go too well for most of the members of my group.

The ~140 yard third, over a coastal pond, is one of the most idyllic par 3s that you’ll see. There’s nothing really outstanding about the design; it’s just a circular green surrounded by bunkers. But there’s a subtle ridge running from front-left to back-right across the green that makes putting difficult if you’ve missed the green or hit the wrong side of it.

From pictures that I’d seen of the course before, I figured that the fourth would be one of the less interesting holes. I was completely wrong. It’s a brilliant short par 4.

While it’s a straight-forward drive from the middle tees (just left of the third green), it’s a very challenging drive out of a chute to the right of the third green from the tips. The key feature here is the large rise in the fairway. Unless you hit it >215 or hug the right side, you’ll hit into the face of the hill and have a semi-blind or blind uphill approach to the green. And if you get aggressive, take driver or three-wood and pull it left, there’s a hidden pond left of the fairway, with the left side of the fairway sloping in this direction.

So it’s really important to hit a good drive here because if you don’t (1) the visibility on the second will be poor and (2) you’ll end up with a fairly long approach into a well-defended, narrow hilltop green. You really don’t want to be coming into this green with more than a wedge, which makes the drive critical. It’s a great example of fairway contours making a hole great—and it won’t be the last time that we’ll see this.

​The downhill par 3 fifth is another hole with great contours. The green is very wide but very shallow and fronted by a deep bowl. There’s a huge diagonal ridge running from back-left to front-right and if you hit a good shot, it should funnel into the main right section of the green. Originally, there was a pin placement short and left of this ridge but this part of the green has shrunk and it’s probably too small now. It should be expanded again.

​While the drive from the tips on the famous par 5 sixth is obviously spectacular, it’s also quite scary. We’ve been going out for the first six holes so it’s still into the wind but the hole turns a little right so it’s also quartering from the left—pushing your ball right toward the pond on the right. This drive probably isn’t too tough when it’s calm but when it is when the wind is blowing (I put one, almost two in the right pond).

​The rest of the hole doesn’t share the interest of the drive. It’s flat and pretty wide open. I think this hole has a lot of problems with flooding and there’s a lot of sandy bare ground in the middle of the fairway between the drive and the layup zone. I think the second shot would be more interest if they formalized this into a sandy waste area.

Apparently some time back some Canadian golf magazine did a list of the best holes in Canada and sixth hole was on it. This left regulars puzzled…because they thought that the par 5 seventh was better. I’d agree with them. This is one of the best par 5s that I’ve seen and pretty clearly the course’s signature hole despite the many strong contenders.

But let’s start with the negative; the forest on the left off the tee has become overgrown. Hopefully the recent Hurricane Fiona, one of the most powerful storms ever to hit this region, took care of some of them. As of July 2022, it was a butt-puckeringly narrow drive, although long hitters can just go straight over the trees (probably 240 in the air). If you go straight down the chute, you probably need to hit it 250 to carry up the slope in the middle of the fairway. If you can carry the trees to the left or 270 down the fairway, you’ll reach the far side and kick forward. Like the fourth, this is a great example of using contours to make a great drive. And it’d be even better with tree removal on the left because then you could use that hill to kick the ball forward into the fairway valley and it’d kick right if you didn’t make the carry.

While the drive is enough to make the hole excellent, all subsequent shots and the green are great too. If you’ve hit a decent drive, there’s some thinking to do on the layup (it’s 570 uphill so you’re probably not reaching in two). There are staggered bunkers left then right in the layup zone, about 130 and 90 yards short of the green respectively. The safe shot is to lay back of both but there’s enough room to get past the first one if you’ve hit a good enough drive. It’s also important to be up the right side of the fairway because the green angles from front-right to back left.

Finally, the green is one of the course’s best, funneling out to the front-left but with a lot of interesting little ripples, almost like it had settled unevenly in the course’s almost 100 year existence. All-in-all, it's one of the best par 5s that I've seen in its current state but with some work, it'd be in the very small handful of the absolute best.

The short par 4 eighth is an oddball but another one of my favorites. The drive is probably about 30 feet uphill over a ridge, with bunkers on either side. They’re only about 150 to carry but still make for a difficult shot for shorter-hitting golfers.

What makes this hole so great for the rest of us is that from the crest of the fairway at about 180 yards, it’s almost all downhill to the green. So it’s easily drivable even for those who aren’t the longest hitters. But the woods encroach on the left and you’d better be accurate if going for it. If you layup with a long iron as I did, your ball will settle on a plateau about 80 yards short of the large, heavily back-to-front sloping green. It’s a fairly easy hole if you’re careful, but I think that’s appropriate after two of the toughest back-to-back par 5s that you’ll see.

​While the course has been outstanding to this point, the next four holes are relatively weak and I don’t really understand this part of the course. The first thing that I don’t understand is the ~160 yard walk to the ninth tee. This walk is all downhill and it seems to me that Thompson could have just put the ninth tee right next to the eighth green. There’s a massive flat area in front of the current ninth tee that’d only be about 180 yards from here. There’s also a good greensite at the base of the hill just below the halfway house, left of the current fairway. That’d make for a par 4 of about 400 yards.

The current ninth is a another short par 4 (335 yards) that, like the fourth and seventh, uses fairway slopes to make the drive interesting. This time you need about 210 to carry up the slope in the fairway. If you don’t make it, you’ll have a blind approach. If you make it, you’ll still have a blind approach, but a much shorter one. What makes this drive tough is if you take on the slope and don’t hit a fade, it’s easy for the ball to kick left down into the woods. The greensite isn’t too interesting, but that’s appropriate for a blind shot.

In short, I like the current ninth hole, but I think that the routing here would feel a bit more cohesive with my alternative, which should work well in its own right.

​The tenth is a lovely downhill par 3 to a green that’s fairly large but gently crowned, making for some challenging first putts if you haven’t hit it close.

The next two holes, crossing the Clyburn Brook (more like a river) are a bit dull. The short par 5 eleventh is flat and doesn’t have any trouble between the tee and green save for dense forest. The par 3 twelfth is brutal from the tips at 240. It’s also pretty featureless save for the high right side of the green, which makes pitches from right of the green very difficult.

I suspect that this hole would have originally had a view of the river on the left and have been beautiful, but they’ve built a dyke along it to prevent this hole from becoming a swamp after it flooded.

One of the well-known things about Highland Links is the 400+ yard walk from the twelfth to the thirteenth holes. You have two options; you can hike along the river or up and over the hill through the woods. If you’re just playing once, I’d suggest the river walk.

But I don’t really understand why this walk was necessary. While the area between the holes is hilly, it isn’t like we have to go up and over a mountain. Having walked through here, it seemed like most of the area was flat enough to build a hole and looking at it on Google Earth, there’s plenty of flatter ground going toward the fourteenth green. I would think that there could have been a long par 4 or short par 5 here ending somewhere between the current thirteenth tee and fourteenth green. My version of the routing would kill the par 3 tenth, although the ninth green would be near the current eleventh tee.

But that’s not what we have. And there’s an argument to be made for the 400 yard walk in its own right. This course is almost as much about hiking as playing golf. Until 20 or 25 years ago, there were no golf carts here. So the 400 yard walk functioned as an interlude in the golf and a beautiful one at that, alongside the Clyburn Brook. I wonder if Thompson had a more golf-cohesive version of the routing but eschewed it for this one that gives you a pause in the golf and allows you to just take in the scenery?

​Anyway back to the course that’s actually here—the rest of which is very good. The 435 yard thirteenth is another take on the course’s driving theme. If you hit a strong drive up the right side that turns a bit right to left, you can get really far down the fairway. If you hit it a bit too far left, it can kick into the woods. And if you hit a weak fade, it may not go anywhere.

​The most interesting thing about the thirteenth is that we have a very similar shot on the approach and it works very well. Just short of the green there’s a massive diagonal ridge and if you’re well back in the left side of the fairway, you can use this to sling a ball onto the green (as I learned). But if you don’t run it far enough, the ball will run off to the left or right and leave an awkward pitch to much of the green. Apparently the green used to be a punchbowl but this was revised for drainage’s sake. I’m sure that something was lost but the hole is still very good as-is.

While the right-to-left slope of the thirteenth hole will feel comfortable to most right-handers, the dogleg left fourteenth will not, especially if you play the back tees. Both sides of the hole slope gently away and it’s really critical to hit a straight ball or a slight draw here. It’s only about 220 to run into the woods on the right. The problem is that the hole is 400 yards and plays into the wind so if you hit a long iron, you’ll be pretty far back.

And the green, while it looks innocent enough, is no joke if the pin is on the right. This right right half of the green slopes severely away and you’d be in trouble being anywhere left of this pin. It’s much easier if the pin is on the left but like the first, this hole seriously demands solid ball striking…and is less forgiving of inaccuracy.

Fifteen and Sixteen are back-to-back par 5s that are about as good and more fun than six and seven. The drive on fifteen is very reminiscent of seven with a narrow chute, trees and a hill on the left, and a hill that you can carry if you hit a good drive. Like seven, it could use some major tree removal on the left. It’s tougher to reach or clear the hill here, probably ~300 yards. But the second shot is much simpler if you’re laying up, to fairly flat ground and no bunkers.

The green and its surroundings are outstanding. This was all fairly flat land and Thompson built a massive ridge around the green, into which he carved his elegant bunkers. While many of the bunkers on this course have become degraded over time, those on this hole look excellent—probably thanks to work done by Canadian architect Ian Andrew over the last decade-and-a-half. The green is two-tiered and is one of the course’s most challenging if you find yourself far from the hole.

Sixteen is undoubtedly the easiest of the course’s five par 5s at only 460 yards and with an (almost) unmissably wide fairway. But it’s also the most fun. And whatever the par, it’s an excellent hole.

The fairway is quite something—bumpier than almost any links course that I’ve played. A lot fairways here have this bumpiness, but this one is easiest the most bumpy. And apparently all of this was constructed by Thompson and his associates, with Thompson directing the placement of rock and dirt to achieve the look and playing characteristics that he wanted.

​The approach to the hilltop green is also excellent. The major feature here is an almost wall-like hill about 60 yards short of the green. You’ll need to hit a solid shot if coming in from some distance because you’ll be unlikely to run the ball up this. Most decent length hitters should have a chance at the green off a good drive so this shot is a excellent test of a long iron or fairway wood. The green is narrow and runs off at the left, so you’ll also need to be accurate.

​Seventeen is pleasant-looking enough, but you need to be very careful to stay below the hole here because there’s a steep ridge that runs horizontally across the middle of the green.

​It would have been nice if Thompson could have sent the seventeenth hole to the left behind the first green so that the eighteenth could have finished along the ocean. That would have brought the course back from mountains to ocean and would have made for quite an exciting finish.

But the eighteenth is a good hole in its own right. While it’s pretty wide open off the tee, I found it to be very easy to lose my ball to the right for some reason (maybe the alignment of the tee box, which points that way).

You want to aim up the left side because this leaves the best angle into probably the most steeply pitched green on the course. The green both angles and slopes from back-right to front-left and if the pin is in the front-left bowl, you’re much better off missing the green short than anywhere else.

Perhaps more than any course I can think of, Highlands Links is an almost perfect expression of its site (Greywalls in Michigan is up there too). On this land, winding rivers run between forested mountains, out to tidal ponds and finally the sea. Despite my issues with the routing in a few places, it does its main job of exposing you to all of that very well. Like I said, if there weren’t a golf course here, this would be the hiking path that you’d want to take through this land.

So the land is incredibly well-used on the macro-level. But it’s also well-used on a micro-one. The land’s contours provide the course’s main source of driving challenge and opportunity. On at least a half-dozen holes, a well-conceived and well-executed drive can catch a slope and bound forward while one that isn’t well-conceived or isn’t well-executed will hit and upslope and leave a difficult second. This isn’t an accident; even with the same routing, a lesser architect could have put the fairways in slightly different places and lost much of the greatness of holes 4, 7, 8, 13, and 15. The only course that I can think of which uses slopes in the fairways so effectively is Colt’s great St. George’s Hill.

I was also a bit surprised by how good the greens were. Given the reputation of both Thompson and the course, I probably shouldn’t have been. But there’s so much variety in these greens. Some have big, heaving slopes (2, 18). Some have tiers or internal ridges (3, 5, 15). And some just have a lot of less-describable contour (7). If you put this set of greens on an otherwise average course, it’d stand out in most neighborhoods.

I really wish that there were more courses like this: national park courses that took advantage of their spectacular locations. Canada has two more of them: Jasper Park and Banff Springs, both designed by Stanley Thompson in the 30s, I’d imagine to stimulate employment. It’d be great to have courses like these in some of America’s national parks. Imagine if Donald Ross or Alastair MacKenzie had been given a similar mandate to build a course in Yellowstone or on the outskirts of either Great Smoky Mountain National Park or Yosemite? Perhaps then we could have learned to bring golf together with the broader conservation movement and avoid some of the destructive wastefulness that the sport has embraced over the past few decades.

One of the courses that I’ve most wanted to see in my home state of Michigan for awhile now has been Barton Hills in Ann Arbor. While the course has never been too bright a star on lists of the best courses in the state, it’s a Donald Ross course that was restored a few years back by Ron Pritchard. And the pictures that I had seen of the course post-restoration, while not numerous, made it seem very appealing. I’ll always bet on a few pictures of a course over its position (or not) on course rankings as an indicator of whether I’ll like the course.

And it worked here too; the course is every bit as good as what I hoped it might be from the pictures and severely underrated on lists of the best courses in Michigan. It’s easily one of the top 10 and might even make the cut for the top 5. While the course has its share of excellent holes—especially the par 3s—what stands out to me are the green complexes. They aren’t one of the most severe sets in the state, but are full of interesting small contours. Even better is how well they meld with their surroundings. To me, the detail at the edges of the greens is almost ideal. Some spots blend into the surrounding contour, some are built up.

And this combination has great effect on how you should play shots into these greens. Barton Hills has some of the best ‘tucked’ pin positions I’ve seen on any course, where you take on a lot of risk playing to them because of the severe slopes at the nearby edges, but it’s always possible to play to a safe area. While they don’t share the extensive short grass areas around the greens, these greens remind me of Pinehurst no.2 in the sense that there’s always a seriously bad miss but it isn’t too hard to play safe and leave yourself something more manageable.

The bunkering is also some of the best in the state and while the land on the front nine is modest, it’s always very pleasant. Then the Ann Arbor hilliness kicks in on the back nine, which lends some variety to the course. I would say that the course comes up a bit short on the longer par 4s and 5s which sometimes lack a bit of interest, but there’s no doubt to me that this is one of the best courses in the state and perhaps its most underrated.


The first hole, a ~425 yard par 4 is actually a bit of an un-Donald Ross start in that it’s a pretty tough par 4. But it’s also one of the best on the course; there’s real advantage to keeping close to the bunkers up the left side because the hole turns left and it’ll be quite a long approach if you bail out right. But if you do, the green is one of the more open in front and you can run a ball on.

This is one of several greens with a very interesting—and difficult—tucked pin. Check out the front-right pin! Still, it’s always possible to play to the middle of the green and that leaves an uphill putt of the greenskeeper has been unfavorable to you on this day.

The 525 yard second hole shouldn’t be too tough of a hole. While you can’t see the landing area very well, it’s wide-open until a bunker on the right at about 290. But there’s nice subtlety to this hole; it gently turns right and while going up the right side shortens the shot to the green, it also makes the angle more awkward for the layup. This is especially true if you layup short of the bunkers ~75 yards short of the green because the ground there slopes left. The green is also more open from the left side.

While it’s awkward, I liked the sharp dogleg left long par 4 3rd. This is a very difficult hole—about 475 even from the second-to-back tees. And you either need to really cut the tree line close or hit a big draw. It’s easy to leave yourself too long an approach to reach the green. But even if you hit a long drive, it’s still much better to be in the left side of the fairway because the green is tightly bunkered on the right and there’s plenty of room to run one in on the left.

Four is the first short par 4 and I think that most days, it’s a pretty simple hole. The fairway is wide short of 250 and the green is both pretty big and not too heavily contoured.

There’s one exception to this—when the pin is back-right, which it was on this day. This is an extremely dangerous pin to play at, with deep bunkers just short-right and another long. But as we saw at the first and will see several more times, you can reduce the risk by playing just a little bit away from the pin. 15-20 ft. left should be sufficient…which someone in my group got just right!

Our first par 3, the ~170 yard fifth fits the theme. The front of the green is pretty wide, although pitched at a bit of an angle to the tee so it doesn’t quite look it. But the back gets very narrow between deep bunkers and I would advise to play well short of these pins, never past the middle of the green. I tried but failed to follow my own advice, ending up in a bunker pin-high right and was lucky to leave with a 4.

I suspect that the most-criticized hole at Barton Hills is the short par 4 sixth. The drive is mostly blind between bunkers but unlike the second, the blindness here obscures a pond that cuts into the middle of the hole at about 270. Although I’m not a fan of the trend, this is one hole that’d be better if the moved the tees up to where you could drive the green because otherwise, you should never play it any other way but iron—short-iron.

While the rest of the hole is nothing special, the large green on the mid-length par 4 seventh is a beauty. It’s big and indescribably rolling. All of the edge pins here are tough because all parts of the green slope off in the front and there’s also a pretty good drop-off at the back. As usual, you can play to the middle of the green without too much trouble but on this hole especially if the pin is near an edge, it’ll leave you a tough two-putt.

The eighth is the second of Barton Hills’ four excellent par 3s. One of the great things about these par 3s—which is characteristic of most great sets of par 3s—is how much they differ from each other. This one, which can play up to around 220, is very different from five. There’s plenty of room to run the ball onto the green (as you’d want on a long par 3) and the green is very receptive, build into a natural rise. This creates a nice backstop if you run one in a bit too hot but because the green also slopes to the right, you feed your ball right to the tucked back-right pin with a bit of a draw.

The next two holes are par 5s, long and short (560 and 460) respectively. Neither is a particularly strong hole but you need to be very careful on ten as there’s another blind pond that cuts in on the left about 50 yards short of the green. I found it to be a blessing in disguise here that I hit a bad drive and had to lay up because it’s not a green I’d want to go at from any kind of distance.

Eleven is another long par 3 playing up to 240 and like eight, you can run the ball onto the green. Unlike eight, the green gives you no assistance here because it’s gently built up on a pad an runs away at the back. It’s best to hedge short and left here. The length may be similar to eight, but it’s a very different hole.

Twelve is another short par 4 with a pond but unlike the two previous pond holes, this is a very good one. In fact, this might be the best driving hole on the course. At only about 300 to the front of the green even from the back tee block, long hitters could try driving this green. But it’s a good 250 carry over the pond on the direct line and it gets tight, with deep bunkers around the deep, shallow green.

It’s also a good driving hole for the rest of us because you can either cut off some of the pond to shorten the approach or play to the right and avoid it altogether. If you do this, you must be careful not to go too far because bunkers angle in through the fairway and they’re close enough that it’s easy to reach them with any kind of push (they start at ~210 out).

The rest of the back nine is mostly a procession of back-and-forth par 4s that are pretty straight-forward off the tee but have very interesting and diverse greens. Both thirteen and eighteen have large bunkers at the start of the fairway that obscure more directly threaten bunkers further up. But this hole nearly as interesting off the tee as at the green, which has a bit of a false front and funnels in at its left and right.

Like thirteen, fourteen has a fairway bunker left that long hitters (so not me) should easily clear. While the thirteenth green was concave, this one is convex, sloping off at its edges into bunkers. There’s a classic Barton Hills pin placement at the back-right of the green. You really don’t want to miss if you go at this one.

The terrain is much hillier for the next two holes. I’m not a big fan of the fifteenth, which is blind off the tee, downhill and over a bunker. The fairway is wide—but don’t miss right. The approach is probably 25 feet uphill, so it’s a tough one.

As is the ~200 yard par 3 sixteenth, which probably has the course’s most severe green. While you must be below the pin here, you also must be careful not to be too far below the pin because the green has a pretty good false front.

Seventeen is the longest par 4 on the back nine, stretching to about 480 at the tips. It’s also the best driving hole (other than maybe the twelfth), with a bunker cutting into the left side just about where you’d want to land the ball if playing from the correct set of tees. There’s also a rise in the fairway at the bunker, so you need a pretty good drive to get to a point where you have a good view of the green. And with a tree line and out-of-bounds, there’s no bail out right.

The green is another good one but it’s elevated above its surroundings and tough to hit. Apparently this hole used to be a par 5 and the green might make a bit more sense in that context. But there’s room to bail out short of the green and because of that, I didn’t mind the difficulty.

The final drive is a tough on because like thirteen, the fairway is blind and a bunker cuts in on the left side right where you’d want to drive it. There are several bunkers short and right on the approach, but there’s plenty of room to run the ball onto this large green.

There have been a lot of restorations and renovations of classic courses over the past decade. While I’ve only seen a few of these and I never saw Barton Hills before the renovations, I have to imagine that this was one of the better ones. The detail on an around the greens is as good as I’ve seen anywhere, although I would say that overall, these greens aren’t as difficult as on some of the famous classic courses or on some of the new, neo-golden-age courses.

And I think that this latter point is a real strength for Barton Hills. There’s plenty of interest in the greens throughout, but they’re never severe…unless you miss in a place where you shouldn’t. Over and over again, I see new courses where several of the greens have too many areas around them that are too severe. The worst example of this is Greywalls in the UP, where there are several greens where unless you hit some sliver of land, there’s a good chance that you’ll go back-and-forth across the green on your next few shots. And it isn’t the only example. I don’t mind greens with some severe edges, but this has to be a limited percentage of the overall edges of the green. There must be some realistic bail out space.

That’s the lesson that Pinehurst no.2 teaches so well and Barton Hills exemplifies it better than almost any other course that I’ve played. There is severity here, but unless you’re too aggressive or careless, you’ll probably won’t encounter it. There’s a way for a weaker player to play every hole. But set the pins in some of their tougher spots and this course will be plenty challenging for almost anyone.

I think my main criticism of Barton Hills is that there could be more variety off the tee. There are plenty of fairway bunkers and some tough driving holes, but they’re usually off to the side of the fairway and there’s never too much thinking as long as you hit it straight. It’s still a good course off the tee, but that’s probably enough to keep Barton Hills below the All-American tier of courses (the greens are certainly good enough). Still, Michigan probably has at most 3 or 4 All-American courses and if this one falls just short of that, that’s still pretty good.

Of all the courses that I’ve documented on here, the one with which I probably have the longest history is the University of Michigan. I’ve been playing here for 20 years, since I started (or maybe even before—I can’t remember) as an undergrad here in the fall of 2003. Around that time, I had really wanted to play the course and was excited to finally have the opportunity because it was, and remained until recently, a private course. My initial view: very nice course, but nothing special. I didn’t prefer it to some of the other (at the time) top Michigan courses that I had played, like the Fazio Course at Treetops or Tom Doak’s Black Forest.

But the U of M course has gotten a lot of attention in recent years. Mike DeVries has done some work, taking out trees and bushes and expanding a few greens. And it’s gotten attention from the new set of social golf course influencers, namely the guys at No Laying Up on their Michigan tour. They and several of the guys I play with in Michigan love the course. The pedigree is certainly there; it’s a MacKenzie—Maxwell design on an interesting, hilly piece of property. And it has a fine set of greens including two unusual, sort-of horseshoe shaped greens on 6 and 14 that wind around a bunker.

Yet in the 20 years that I’ve been playing it, I’ve had one opinion of the course, which I’m now pretty convinced is unshakable, at least for the course in its current form: it’s a good golf course with a few very interesting greens and nice terrain, but nothing more. There are some good holes, but none stands out to me as a great one. And the trees, while not as bad as they used to be, are still awful. Several holes are made worse (in some cases substantially) by trees being way too close to the fairway (3,4,11,16,17). For all the talk of MacKenzie, Maxwell, and strategy, there’s mainly one thing that you need to do here and you need to do it on pretty much every hole: just hit the ball straight down the fairway. It’s occasionally a bit more complicated than that, but usually not.

I mentioned that the greens are pretty good and they are. A few are very interesting including the two horseshoe greens nos. 6 and 14 plus the greens on 4, 10, and 2 (if I’m being generous). The rest are good, but nothing special (I’ll get to the 3rd). And the bunkers definitely suggest MacKenzie—Maxwell in their shapes, but have none of the dramatic height/depth of their more famous works. I don’t know if that’s because they’ve become degraded over time and need to be restored or if they just didn’t build wild bunkers here perhaps because of the heavier soil. In any case the bunkering is good, but leaves something to be desired stylistically (and often in placement).

Some very knowledgable people think that I’m crazy for just thinking that this is a good course, but I know several others who share my views. In fact, until recently, this seemed to be the consensus: good course, maybe one of the better ones in Michigan, but nothing special, at least until they do a serious restoration. That was my view the first time I saw it and—despite a few years between visits and the belief each time I return that something will click for me and the greatness of the course will be revealed—it remains my view.

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The first is a solid par 5. You can swing away off the tee because the bunker on the left is either too far out or you’re playing the wrong tees. The bigger issue is that two very ugly Siberian Elms (this species should be eradicated) in the right rough can partially block you if you push it.

It’s a simple layup as long as you don’t try to get within 75 yards of the green. The green is small but interesting; high in the center, sloping gently to its sides. Good starting hole with a subtle, but good green.

One of the shots that’s always stood out to me at U of M is the drive on the medium-long par 4 second. It’s straight uphill and blind; definitely not the type of shot you typically find on a US public course. It’s a very good driving hole because if you can get it about 250, you’ll hit the downslope and just have a short iron. But like many holes here, it’s not that wide and it doesn’t take much of a push to end up behind a landscaping tree on the right or a pull to end up in the junk on the left.

The par 5 third seems to be a favorite, mostly for its green site. I think that my favorite part is the drive. Again it’s pretty simple—you’ll be fine if you just hit it straight because you can’t go for the green in two. But there’s a decision to made about carrying the bunker on the right (225-240 depending on where they put the tips) and it’s better to be up the right side because it leaves a clearer view for the second.

The next two shots can be very awkward and it’s best to keep things simple. Unless you drive it 330 and get a mid or long iron into the green, don’t even think about going for it. Just hit a mid-iron straight ahead to the end of the fairway. If you try to cut the corner, you’ll end up in the spruce trees of death and spend 10 minutes looking for your ball…like one of my playing partners did when I played here once back in college.

The approach is uphill to a green benched on the side of a hill. A lot of people seem to love this green. I don’t understand why. Of everywhere in the immediate area where you could put a green, this looks like the worst spot, halfway up a hill requiring the construction of a massive ledge. To be fair, once you’re up there, the green itself is interesting, with a nasty little tier at the front-right.

But I’ve never been a fan of this green site and despite writing three paragraphs about it, I just don’t find this hole all that interesting. Yes it’s a good driving hole, but everything else is just awkward.

I’ve always liked the fourth hole but the encroaching trees on the right are a big problem. One thing that I always thought they’d do in a restoration here is remove the rough over the fairway bunker 40 yards short of the green so that you could run the ball on. Still haven’t done it. The green is very good; big with a lot of little rolls. But I’m not as impressed by it as I used to be and this is one hole that I think could (and should) be a lot better.

Five is a nice medium-length par 3 that used to be surrounded by big oak trees. I heard they lost those to disease or maybe a storm. It’s a very nice hole either way, with a green like one that has a high point in the middle and runs off to the sides.

Six is U of M’s most famous hole; the short par 4 with the horseshoe green. I’ve always liked this hole, but now I’m pretty sure that I don’t love it. It’s pretty easy if the pin is in the front because the green slopes toward most of the pin placements. It’s much more difficult and interesting if the pin is in the back. But unlike the superior horseshoe 7th green at Crystal Downs, you can’t putt from much of the front part to the back part. Vice versa works, but why would you ever be at the back of the green if the pin is in the front?

The downhill, yet blind medium-short par 4 seventh always gives people trouble. It’s easy to end up in the trees left and if you push it a little, a slope right of the fairway will push you toward junk/landscape trees right. Just pull an iron and hit it straight.

I’ve always liked the uphill par 3 eighth, which is probably my favorite of the course’s par 3s (I tend to like uphill par 3s). I think it’s a much more appealing hillside green site than the third and the bunkering is well-done, if nothing too special.

The par 4 ninth is one of the course’s better driving holes but it’s deceptive. You’d think that you’d want to skirt the fairway bunkers but no, the angle into the green is better from the right side of the fairway, near Ohio Buckeye trees. I’m a big fan of the Ohio Buckeye as a landscape tree but I have no idea why they planted so many of them here and at Radrick Farms. Maybe the tree farm guy was a closet Ohio State fan?

Ten is an uninteresting uphill drive and while the approach also isn’t too interesting, the green is. It’s big and receptive, but with a lot of little ridges. The pin placement on this day was in a little bowl at the back.

The par 5 eleventh exemplifies the main problem with U of M: too many trees too close to the fairway. And U of M probably has the worst planted species of any course that I’ve seen. Left of this fairway are Dawn Redwoods from China and Norway Spruce. These are awful tree species for a golf course because they suck up balls and completely block shots. As silly as it was to plant the symbol of their chief rival on their golf course, at least the Ohio Buckeye is native in the area.

Twelve is the course’s long par 3 and I guess it’s pretty good; there’s ample room to run the ball onto the green. But I’ve never seen the course play firm enough for this to work and I think that the ridge at the front-right is a bit too steep. It’s never been one of my favorite long par 3s.

The short par 4 thirteenth is more interesting and I did something that I’ve never done before on my most recent playing: play from the back tee that’s tucked into the trees. Really, it’s a good hole from anywhere because the massive fairway bunker on the left side makes you think about what you want to do with your drive. It’s easy just to lay up short and you’ll still have a short approach if you do. But there’s an advantage in taking it on as you can have a very short pitch. The green is a bit big and dull for it to be a great hole, but it is a good one.

Fourteen is the other horseshoe par 3. It’s a very nice green but I’m not sure that the horseshoe is contributing too much here; I’d probably like the hole more if the green were just the back two-thirds. That front part isn’t doing anything for me.

Fifteen is another medium-length par 4 and one that I’ve come to appreciate more over the years. It’s a very good hole because it makes you do something from the tee, namely keep your drive close to the spruce trees on the left. There’s a lot of room out to the right but the approach to the green is very awkward from there because it angles from front-left to back-right along a bunker.

Still, it’s a bit ironic that the main reason that this hole is good is because of spruce trees. The trees make it good because they can knock your ball out of the area and you can end up dead underneath them. That introduces much more risk to going up the left side than if there were deciduous trees or bunkers.

I don’t think that any of the last three holes here is on anyone’s list of favorites. Sixteen and seventeen are both straight-away par 4s with drives excessively cluttered by trees. The trees on seventeen are the worst on the course. Trees between the fairways completely obscure a very interesting joint fairway bunker.

A lot of people seem to like eighteen even less, but I’ve never minded it. I’ve always thought that it was a pretty good driving hole. If you keep it less than 260 from the tips, the fairway is huge. If you want to go further than that, you have to hit it straight. But you can’t go much further because the pond is about 325 out. Nothing about the approach is very inspiring, but it’s a solid long par 4 finisher.

So there’s my take on U of M. There’s a lot to like about the course; several good greens, a few very good holes, generally interesting terrain. But there really isn’t a moment here where I feel that the course is giving me something special. I don’t think that there are any great holes. And the trees, despite many being removed over the years, are still really bad. I can’t think of a course that has a worse collection of tree species than this one—even Forest Akers West at Michigan State, which is an actual arboretum!

I would not rule out that there’s a version of this course that’s a very good or even great course. It’s got the land for it. But that course is a long way off. This one needs a lot of tree removal and a lot of work on the greens and bunkers. I was excited a decade or so back when I heard that Mike DeVries was going to be working on the course. I thought that it would become the course that I hoped it could be. Unfortunately the changes haven’t done much to move the needle with me and I’m afraid that the course isn’t substantively different than it was when I started playing it 20 years ago.

How do I think it compares to other Michigan courses? I definitely prefer its sister course Radrick Farms just up the road. The terrain there is even better and while it may not be Pete Dye’s most strategically interesting course, it’s more interesting than this one. I drew (expected) heat for saying it, but I don’t think that U of M is much better than the crown jewel of Ann Arbor Parks and Recreation’s set of municipal courses, Leslie Park. That course is also on very interesting terrain and save for the fact that the greens aren’t as nuanced and there are 1 or 2 awkward holes, it compares favorably to this one.

For me, U of M doesn’t sniff Michigan’s top 10 public courses. It might be in the 25, but even that’d be close for me. In the greater Detroit area—which is certainly not a repository of the state’s best public courses—it’s probably in the top 5, but that’s it. I prefer 1-18 at Shepherd’s Hollow (but not 19-27) and it’s a close call with Blackheath, the Orchards, and Coyote Preserve. I’d probably take it over Calderone Farms. So that puts it in the 2-5 range; pretty good, but definitely not the lofty company in which some people I know—and whose opinions I respect—would have it.

Although I grew up only about an hour away from the border, I had never played golf in Ohio until June 2022. That might seem surprising at first but it really isn’t—unless you have access to the state’s numerous excellent private courses, where would you go? The Virtues (formerly Longaberger) east of Columbus is supposed to be good as are several Cleveland-area courses. But why would I make a 3 or 4 hour drive out there when the same drive in the other direction gets me to Forest Dunes, Treetops, and Arcadia Bluffs? Actually, the better question is why I hadn’t played golf in Indiana until 2021 because it has several excellent public courses worth the trip.

But when I got an opportunity to play a few northern Ohio private courses in June 2022, I was happy to take it. One of these courses was Sylvania Country Club, which lies about a mile from the Michigan border in the northwest suburbs of Toledo. This is an old Willie Park Jr. course which, I had been told, is on some of the best land in northern Ohio. Now you usually don’t think of northwestern Ohio as a place where you’d find great land for golf—I certainly don’t see much of it driving I-75 or I-80—but this course lies in and above the floodplain of the Ottawa River and even in a flat area, land tends to get a bit more interesting for golf around a river.

And the land here was not oversold—it’s one of the best looking forested golf course sites that I’ve seen. The property is long and narrow and the routing is mostly back-and-forth, but the big rolling hills make for repeatedly interesting holes, even though there’s only one fairway bunker and not a ton of strategic interest. I suppose that there are spots where if you’re familiar with the course, you might want to lay back or hit it a little further to get a flatter lie or a better angle. But generally, a straight ball down the middle will work here, even if that isn’t always because of partial or sometimes full blindness.

To me, the course presents an interesting case of how much you value different elements of golf course architecture. To simplify heavily, there are two ways to make an interesting golf course: one that starts with good land and generates interest from the aesthetic and shot making value that the landforms combined with a good routing create (uneven lies, blind shots, playing off slopes) but has fewer created elements and a second on less interesting land that generates interest though interesting bunker placement/shaping and contouring, especially on and around the greens. Obviously the best courses have both and many have neither, but consider this simplified scenario of two courses, one with good land and few designed elements and one with mediocre land but good designed elements.

Sylvania is certainly in the former category. Despite the architectural pedigree, there aren’t a lot of added elements here. In addition to having only one fairway bunker, the green side bunkering is fairly standard (but good) and the greens are good, but nothing special. The green pads are built up in a simple, but appealing way (similar to Park Jr.’s Battle Creek) but there are probably fewer interesting contours here than there. Still, I’m inclined to favor a good type one course like this over a similarly good type two course because it’s hard for the hand of man to match the originality of the hand of God (or whatever process you believe in). Courses like this will have a natural uniqueness because all good land is different and there will be a few shots that look and play different from anything you’ve seen before. I wouldn’t say that I’d always prefer a type one over a type two course, but I think that all else equal, they’re where my sympathy lies.


Having said that, Sylvania doesn’t start on interesting land; it starts in a floodplain. The 380 yard first isn’t an original hole—apparently the old first was where the driving range is now. The drive lacks distinction but the second plays uphill to a green cut into a hill at the base of an apartment building. Not the most exciting first hole, but solid and not too difficult.

The second is an awkward par 5 that criss-crosses the Ottawa River. It’s only about 260 to run into the river from the regular tees. Even if you put your drive right at the end of the fairway, going for it in two would require about a 240 yard carry over the river to a green without much bailout room. Best to play this hole conservatively.

But the first two holes aren’t really part of the course that I described above—Sylvania starts to get going with the par 3 third. This is an excellent, uphill par 3 of about 160 yards to a small green that pitches steeply from back-to-front.

And it gets even better with the 500 yard fourth. This hole starts with a completely blind over a hill about 80 yards in front of the tee—evidence that it was designed by an Englishman. But once you clear the hill, the rest of the hole sprawls out in front of you. It’s a beautiful sight, one that reminded me of the seventh hole on the Old Course at Sunningdale (also a Park Jr. course).

The landforms don’t just create beauty. Two hills cut into the fairway in the right side of the layup zone and you either need to carry these, which probably require you to get within about 120 yards of the green, or play out to the left, which will leave you an awkward angle. If you go for the green, two bunkers left keep you honest but mounds short and right of the green may allow you to kick one in. This is a fine example of great land making a great hole.

Fairway contours also generate the main interest in the long par 4 fifth. If you carry it about 250, your ball will kick forward. If not, you get stuck on a hill and have a long second shot. The green is open in front and will accept a long shot but as with several greens, the fairway mowing lines could be expanded here.

Apparently the flat, 170 yard sixth is non-original, which you might figure if you didn’t know because you basically have to walk from the green back to the tee for the seventh tee. But I appreciated the minimalist construction around the green, which I felt fit in well with the rest.

Seven has a choice of two tees—left, not far from the fifth green and right, closer to the sixth. While I assume that the former is the original, I prefer the latter. This makes the drive a dogleg right and either requires you to lay back, or hit a fade around a large oak tree (the only kind here) on the right. The fairway slopes a bit from right-to-left, so the fade really comes in handy here.

The approach is uphill to a ridgeline green and you really don’t want to go long.

The par 5 eighth is a simple driving hole, but the hole gradually narrows as you near the green. At about 550 yards, most won’t be able to go for it in two and the premium is on an accurate layup.

The weakness of Sylvania is its consecutive par 3s nine and ten, which play in the opposite direction across the Ottawa River. They’re both about 150 yards and feel like the same hole. A further detraction of the ninth is a green that is clearly massively shrunken from its original pad.

Eleven features the course’s only fairway bunker on the left, but it’s small and the fairway is wide, so it shouldn’t be much of an issue. Like number five, the bigger issue again is making sure that you reach the top of the hill, probably ~240 yards. The approach is downhill over a ditch to a green that pitches pretty good from right-to-left. It’s not a hard approach if you’ve cleared the hill but it would be if you haven’t.

While the contours of the land have played an important role in several holes so far, there’s none in which they’re a more integral part of what makes the hole than on the long par 4 twelfth. This is simply one of the best long par 4s that I’ve seen.

It’s another uphill drive and the hole clearly turns left. The slope suggests either playing a draw or hugging the left tree line. Doing one of these is more important that you’d think—it’s pretty easy to run out of room on the right if you push it. If you pull it off, your ball will kick forward and you’ll have a short to mid-iron. If not, you’ll be stuck up on the hill and have a long iron or fairway wood and it’ll require a solid second to carry a diagonal ditch that runs about 20 yards short of the green. A shot from the ditch is perfectly playable but obviously, you’d rather not be there. And it’s just much easier to avoid that if you’ve hit a good drive.

There’s a long walk back to the regular tees on the mid-length par 4 thirteenth and a really long one (>200 yards) to the tips. The land in this part of the course is tamer but you’ll need accuracy to avoid being blocked by trees left (jail) and right (more manageable). Apparently this green is also not an original but it sits very simply on the land and I liked its look.

Of all the holes on the course, the one that gave me the most ‘Park Jr. in England’ flavor was the fourteenth: a 220 yard partially blind par 3 over a ridge. I suspect that originally, this hole might have been completely blind but that the club cut a gap in the middle of the ridge, which they used to build up the walkway that leads to it. There’s just one bunker left and the contours allow you to feed you ball onto the green from the right, similar to Park Jr.’s seventh green at Stoneham near Southampton, England.

Great hole, but I’d like it even more if they filled the gap in the ridge to make it completely blind and moved a rock back and forth along the ridge to indicate the day’s pin placement. That’d be an all-world par 3.

Fifteen features another drive up-and-over a ridge. Best to position your drive up the left (near the spruce trees) to leave the best angle in.

Sixteen is another straight-away par 5 but features one of the more uncomfortable drives as trees pinch left and right in the driving zone. The second is mostly blind over a rise but like most holes here, you’ll be fine if you just aim (and hit it) down the middle.

Seventeen, another par 5, is an easier driving hole as long as you don’t push one to the right and get blocked by trees. If you do, it’ll be more difficult to carry the blind ditch that runs up about 70 yards short of the green. It’ll be easy for a decent length hitter to reach the green off a good drive but there are several bunkers short and you’ll need to make the full carry.

Eighteen is probably the toughest driving hole and maybe just the toughest par 4. It’s about 260 to the sycamore on the left and that’s just past where you’ll want to hit it. Anything down the right side will be blocked by a black walnut on the other side of the river. The approach is probably one club uphill and it’s all carry.

I mentioned at the outset that all else equal, I prefer a course like Sylvania which has good land and modest design over the opposite. The landforms make for a lot of interesting drives and lies than most courses that you’ll see. I didn’t say much about the trees, but they play an important role here too. More than most courses I can think of, they favor shaping off the tee without being too imposing. They’re also spaced far enough apart where if you hit it in them, you’ll often have a shot. Finally, they’re oaks, so they let in enough sunlight for grass to grow. The density of the grass is perfect because the course is mostly on high ground and these areas are unirrigated.

I do think that Sylvania would benefit from a few fairway bunkers because there are a few drives which lack interest—after all, great land and great design is better than great land and good design. More important is restoring the greens; there are several that have clearly shrunken from their original pads. I think that this would especially help with the par 3s around the river.

But Sylvania is a good, old course and we don’t have too many of these in the area. Hopefully the club will follow the recent restoration trend and bring some of these greens back to their original sizes and shapes.

Leading up to previous trips to the Pinehurst area in 2002 and 2019, I had never heard much about Southern Pines Golf Club. I had heard of the course; I knew that it was one of the other Donald Ross courses in Pinehurst. But it didn’t garner much attention as a course worth adding as the 4th or 5th course on a trip to the area. Same was true for Mid Pines in 2002; I had heard of it and knew that it was a Ross course, but no one seemed to think to much of it so it was lower on my list of Pinehurst area courses to see than Tobacco Road or Pinehurst no.8 (I still might have liked it more than the latter…).

But sometime after my 2019 visit (or maybe before; I don’t remember the timing), I had heard that the family that owned Pine Needles, which had bought Mid Pines and restored to being the outstanding course that it now is, had bought Southern Pines and was hiring Kyle Franz to give the course the same treatment that he had given Mid Pines and Pine Needles. That of course made Southern Pines a course that I’d have to come back and see—which I saw more as an opportunity than a burden because Pinehurst is only about 5 1/2 hours from where I live in DC and Pine Needles and Mid Pines alone were already always worth the trip to see. Although it’s getting hard to justify the cost to play no.2 because they make you stay at the over-crowded and overly expensive Pinehurst resort, a trip to the Pinehurst area is plenty justified without it.

Never having looked into playing Southern Pines before, I didn’t know much about the course. But I assumed that it’d be similar to Pine Needles and Mid Pines, crossing rolling but not-too-hilly terrain with more moderate greens than no.2. I assumed wrong. Despite the shorter overall yardage, this is a more severe course than either Pine Needles or Mid Pines. I’m not sure that the property is much hillier that Pine Needles, but the routing is much tighter (more like Mid Pines), meaning that most holes cover pretty steep terrain and—critically—that the green sites are more severe.

It’s that latter element that, to me, makes Southern Pines feel very different from either Pine Needles or Mid Pines. Many of the greens are sited on hillsides and the most notable—and different—thing about them is how many have false fronts, and how severe these are. Both Pine Needles and Mid Pines are well-suited to shorter hitters who need to use the ground to run their ball onto greens. Southern Pines emphatically is not. You need to play an aerial game here. And a very precise one at that; missing short can result in your ball running 25 yards back down a hill on several occasion. And missing long means that your next shot will probably run 25 yards down that hill…

I wasn’t expecting ‘severity’ to be the word that I’d associate with Southern Pines, but it is. It reminds me of Tobacco Road a bit in that while they don’t look similar and the design elements are quite different, there are a lot of shots that if you miss, it’s easy to run up a big score. I’m not a big fan of that. But my bigger issue with Southern Pines is the amount of times that you face the same scenario: an approach to a green with a severe false front and nowhere else particularly good to miss. By my count, this applies to at least 7 or 8 greens. So I came away with far less affection for this course than either Pine Needles or Mid Pines. But that doesn’t make it bad and, in a sense, is what makes it an essential part of a Pinehurst trip; variety is a good thing.


But one hole which certainly isn’t severe is the ~360 yard first. Ross opening holes tend to be a gentle handshake; this is a downright effeminate (sorry…) one.

Many can probably get pretty close to the green with their drive but I’d advise against this—bunkers pinch the fairway about 75 yards short of the green. Best to lay back to your favorite yardage; you definitely don’t want to leave your approach above the hole here.

The par 5 second plays up and over a hill and if you can get your drive running, you can easily get within distance to reach the green. And you should go for the long ball because there isn’t too much trouble.

The layup is simple; just leave it at the base of the hill about 90 yards short of the green. This is the first of many greens with a severe false front. I (fortunately) didn’t find out for myself, but if you miss your approach short, the ball might come about 90 yards back down the hill. Just tell your playing partners that you wanted to use the whole backstop for your layup…

By the 200 yard par 3 third, you’re definitely getting a sense of the precision required in hitting into these greens. The green is heavily bunkered, has a pretty good false front, and slopes pretty good from back-to-front. Front pins are tough although they’re in a shallow bowl that’ll hold your ball if you hit a good shot.

Four may only be about 385 yards (I don’t even remember seeing the 435 back tee that’s on the card…which is just as well), but it’s about the most difficult hole of that length that I’ve seen. The drive is tricky for someone who fades the ball with the bunkers on the right although there is some room between the first and second set.

The approach is one of the more uphill shots you’ll likely face this side of Cleeve Hill and Painswick and the green is quite shallow. Simply put, you need to hit a very precise iron here. Definitely don’t go at a left pin because this is where the green is at its narrowest.

At this point, there’s a choice of two holes that you can play next. There’s a par 5 which is the fifth hole on the card. Or there’s a short par 3 off to the left that’s apparently an old Ross hole that had been left fallow but has been revitalized, if not restored. It’s about 130 yards to a green that slopes pretty good from right-to-left and has a bowl at the left side. It’s a good hole, but it felt to me like something from one of the new par 3 courses that you’re supposed to play in bare feet. Maybe I would have liked it more if I had done that (or hit better shots…).

The real fifth hole is a long, downhill par 5. Actually it doesn’t play that long because there’s a massive downslope in the fairway that’ll bring your ball about 80 yards closer to the green.

From here, we have one of the course’s best approach shots. A waste area bisects the fairway ~100 yards short of the green and trouble runs up its right. But if you can carry this, you can run the ball all the way onto the green. The green slopes back-to-front but doesn’t have any of the severity at its edges that many of the others do. Plus it has excellent interior contour. Great hole.

While very difficult, I also thought that the long par 4 sixth was a great hole. The drive is very challenging and downright cruel to anyone who hits a draw. The bunker on the left is probably only about 250 from the tips, so you’ll need to hit a fade off it. The approach is gently uphill to a big green that does have a false front, but one that’s much less severe than others. It also has excellent interior contour.

Seven is a par 3 of about 195 from the tips where once again, you just have to hit the green. There’s a massive hollow short and the odds of hitting the green from one of the back bunkers are about as good as the odds of hitting it from the tee. I think this hole would work better from the ~160 yard middle tees. Ever par 3 here save for hole 5a was a 5 or 6 iron for me from the tips and making this one a bit shorter, especially given the severity of the green site, would add some variety.

Also difficult, but certainly not in need of any tweaking, is the 390 yard par 4 eighth. This is a very difficult driving hole with a bunker about 250 out on the right and a fairway that slopes away on both sides (into trees on the left).

Although it’s probably more notable for its beauty than its shot interest, the former is more than enough to make the approach an excellent one. Apparently you couldn’t see the lake right of the hole before because there was a forest. I’m as much a tree lover as anyone, but I can’t imagine that it wasn’t worth it to cut it down…unless there were old-growth longleaf pines or baldcypress down there.

Nine is another tough par 3 with a severe false front. Again, long is trouble but the front right bunker wasn’t too bad (although it’s a terrible shot to end up there).

The short par 4 tenth has a new tee just behind the ninth green which makes for a—to me—very pleasing semi-blind drive over a waste area. You’re advised to hit a conservative tee shot from here though as the fairway slopes pretty good from left-to-right and the angle means that you’re playing slightly down the slope. Another uphill approach to a heavily contoured green with a pretty good false front.

Now the reason that we played the alternate short par 3 fifth was that they were doing work on the short par 4 eleventh and it was out-of-play. Too bad; it’s one of the best looking holes on the course. At 325 yards, long hitters can go for the green and it’s a very interesting shot because you have to decide how much of the bunkers on the right you can carry. The ground feeds toward the green but if you pull it, it’s easy to run through the fairway into bunkers.

The 425 yard twelfth is in a flatter portion of the course and reminds me of something you might find on no.2 or Mid Pines. Bunkers encroach on the left, demanding an accurate drive. The approach is gently uphill over a waste area to a green with a gentler false front. There’s also an opportunity to kick one on using the high ground left of the green. This hole is much subtler than most others on the course but no less interesting.

Less subtle, but also interesting is the 420 yard thirteenth. Bunkers encroach on the right this time but there’s a bit more room.

However, it’s all about the approach here, which is the most unusual on the course. It’s downhill and the green is open in front, making this one of the few greens that you can run a ball onto. But there’s also a nasty mound in the front middle of the green that can kick your ball in any direction—including through the green as I unfortunately learned.

Fourteen is a bit more forgiving than the other par 3s. While there’s another severe false front, there’s much more room between the bunkers and you can use the slope in the left side of the green to feed the ball toward right pins. This was probably my favorite of the par 3s because you can play it in a greater variety of ways.

Fifteen is an excellent shorter (~500 yards) par 5. It’s a generous fairway and you’ll want to take advantage because if you hit a short drive here, you might have trouble carrying the cross bunkers ~80 yards short of the green.

Again, this green has a pretty good false front although I mind it less here than on some of the other holes because tee-to-green, this one isn’t so difficult. It’s a good type of hole to have a severe green site because you’re either going for it in two—in which case it’s reasonable to demand a solidly struck shot—or you have a short third…and the same applies.

Sixteen is an interesting short (315 yard) par 4. The fairway is quite wide if you layup, but narrows as you get closer to the green. Still, it’s not so narrow and I think it’s pretty sensible for long hitters to go for it here.

The green is narrow but deep. It’s best to be coming in from online with the green short but if you go for it, a pitch from the right also isn’t bad because the green tilts pretty good from left-to-right. A straight-forward, but well-conceived hole.

The seventeenth is also well-conceived, albeit a bit less straight-forward. The main difficulty here is with the drive; there are staggered bunkers left then right and you need an accurate drive to avoid them. It’s best to be in the right side of the fairway because the green opens up from this angle.

The approach is to what’s probably my favorite green on the course. While left and long are no good as the ground clearly slopes from back-left to front-right, the contouring short and right of this green is subtle and excellent; some of my favorite of any of Franz’s Pinehurst-area renovations.

Other than a par 3, a medium-short par 4 is probably the rarest type as a finisher, but Southern Pines’ is excellent. It’s one of the best driving holes on the course; it’s only about 220 to carry the bunker on the left but pull it at all and you’ll hit the trees, push it and the slope of the fairway will likely take it into the right bunkers. It’s a simple layup but hit driver and it demands either a very precise straight ball or a draw.

The approach is…yep, to another hilltop, false front green. I like this one in its own right for a finishing hole but by this point, it’s been a bit too much of the same thing for me.

And that’s my main criticism of Southern Pines: the approach shots lack a bit in variety. It’s a very good driving course, with a variety of views, bunker configurations, and slopes. But more than half of the greens are sited on hillsides with steep false fronts and bunkers around the rest making it a very demanding, but not varied test of iron play. 4 or 5 greens like this would be great but at least half of them are and I think that’s too much.

It just occurred to me that one of the issues might be that like on all of today’s restorations, there’s probably a lot more short grass around the greens than on the previous version. I don’t know for sure whether that’s true because I didn’t play the previous version, but I bet it is. And this might be a case where rough around the greens, or at least a few of them would have been better because it wouldn’t have resulted in so much severity.

Given the quality of today’s bermuda grass, I bet that even if there had been short grass around the green in Ross’s time, they would have played nothing like this—they would have been shaggier and the ball would have been more likely to hold up. So I suspect that I’d prefer the green complexes if they were somewhere between the current version and what I assumed the old version was—some surrounded by short grass, some with a bit more rough.

Although for me, the lack of variety and severity keep Southern Pines below Mid Pines and Pine Needles, they contribute to the overall variety in the Pine Needles stable of courses. I came here expecting something similar to Pine Needles and Mid Pines and certainly did not get that. Like I said, in terms of difficulty, it reminded me more of Tobacco Road. While that means that taken in itself, I don’t like Southern Pines as much as some of the other courses in town, it also means that it’s an excellent complement to them. Despite my criticisms, I still think that Southern Pines is an excellent course. And perhaps all the better that it’s different from its new siblings.

Like The Addington, Knole Park is the creation of architect JF Abercromby who didn’t leave us many courses, but what he left is distinctive. Even over years of tree growth and neglect, The Addington was still one of the London heathland courses most worth a visit and with the current restoration by Clayton, DeVries, and Pont, it will likely be one of the 4 or 5 best.

While a London area course—Knole Park is about a 15 minute walk from the Sevenoaks commuter stop, which is the first major station to the city’s southeast and probably one of its busiest—Knole Park is not a heathland course. I tend to think that heathland courses are a less distinctive type of course than they’re given credit for; the defining feature is that they have heather but several of the better ones, like St. George’s Hill, don’t have that much. They also tend to have a lot of Scots Pine trees although some like Walton Heath don’t have many of these. Nor is the terrain distinctive. What distinguishes a heathland course is that it’s on acidic soil. But this doesn’t matter for golf per se—what matters for golf is the terrain and I just don’t see a systematic difference across heathland and non-heathland courses.

So Knole Park isn’t a heathland course in that it doesn’t have heather and pines but like Abercromby’s other most famous (heathland) course, it does have wild terrain. Actually, Knole Park’s terrain is even wilder than The Addington although it’s of a bit less consequence for playing because this course is much wider and there’s less chance that the wild terrain will result in a lost ball.

Knole Park is in a giant deer park—they’re abundant throughout the course—and gets its name from its location on the grounds of the spectacular Knole House, which dates to the 15th century and is one of the 5 largest houses in England. Because the course is in a park, golfers are accompanied by many pedestrians on a day visit to Knole House and there are many on the paths that cross the course, especially at its closest points to the house (6th, 7th, 13th, 14th holes). I’m not exactly sure why, but I’ve always found this multi-purpose aspect of so many British courses very charming although it can sometimes be a nuisance for the golfer and dangerous (i.e. St. Enodoc’s tenth hole). This property is so broad and open however that in my multiple rounds, it was never an issue.

So that’s enough about the general features of the property, how about the course? It was one of my personal favorites in England although I’d hesitate to say that it’s one of the best. The reason I think I liked it so much is the property’s openness, which makes it very beautiful and, combined with the very challenging terrain, makes the golf feel adventurous. It’s a bit the same feeling that I got playing at Cleeve Hill, although the golf here certainly isn’t as adventurous. Although the openness is the main thing that you’ll remember, there are a few points where the course could use to be a bit more open, with landscape trees having narrowed the corridors of a few holes a bit too much. Apparently the property lost many ancient trees in a 1987 storm and some of these were probably replacements. But the course doesn’t need them because even treeless, the land is dramatic enough to ensure sufficient challenge.


Like The Addington, Knole Park starts on a par 3. Also like The Addington and several of the other courses that start on a par 3 in England, this apparently isn’t the original first hole. Although a par 3 isn’t my ideal start, this is a good one, ~190 yards to a green that’s open in front but has a diagonal series of bunkers from short-left to long-right.

The second hole is a straight-away, uphill par 4 of about 350 yards from the standard tees. There’s about an 80 yard walkback to a back tee that would make it a bit of a dogleg left. Two things are important here: one, don’t get your drive behind the massive oak tree left of the fairway; two, be sure to take enough club on the uphill approach.

I think I read somewhere that the first two holes at Knole Park were originally one hole, a par 5 playing to the second green. While I like both of the existing hole, I think that this hole would probably be an improvement. There’s be plenty of room to stick a par 3 somewhere else to make up for it.

One hole which you certainly wouldn’t want to replace is the 400 yard third, which is a great one. You play blind over a hill into a valley which houses a shared fairway between this and the fourth hole. But you can see the green from the tee so once you’re down there, it’s uphill to the green, which is cut beautifully into the surrounding hills. There’s a lot of trouble around this green in the form of little humps and hollows. Like the previous hole, you’ll probably need extra club for the approach.

The par 4 fourth is another hole that has been changed. The tee used to be just left of the third green, which created a blind shot over a big fern-covered (or as they’d say in England, ‘bracken-covered’) hill to the second half of the current valley fairway.

At some point, the tee was moved up the hill to the right of the third green, which creates a drive that crosses over the third fairway but gives a much better view. Despite my general affection for blind drives, having looked at the hole from the old tee (the pad is still there), I think it was a good change. It’s a very good looking drive from the current tees, with the fairway following the natural valley left to the green.

The problem with this hole is that it’s become choked-out by trees on the left and tick-filled junk on the right. The club could really use to lose the trees on the left—the drive would still be plenty difficult because a long hitter could clear the hill but a weak drive could get stuck on it.

There’s about a 120 yard uphill walk to the par 3 fifth tee. I wonder if there used to be another hole in here? In any case, the current par 3 is a solid and exacting one. You need a well-struck tee shot because the green sits on a hill and you can’t run one up.

While there are a few good ones in the first five, for me, Knole Park really gets going with the sixth hole, which is simply one of the most brilliant driving hols that I’ve ever seen. It’s hard to tell from the tee, but it’s a split fairway, one obvious one in the valley in front of you but another blind one over the hill running in the direction of the green.

The hill creates one of the great driving challenges that I’ve ever seen. If you don’t carry it, your ball will either get stuck on it or kick down into the low fairway. It’s a shorter carry over it to the left but if you don’t fade a drive on this line, you can run into the junk on the other side. If you go for the longer carry, you have to be careful not to let it leak right because the right side of the left fairway slopes down into the right valley fairway. There’s a small bunker near the end of the valley fairway, right where a drive kicking right from the high-left line is likely to end up.

While you have a good look at the green from anywhere in the left fairway, the approach from the valley is completely blind and must come over diagonal bunkers fronting the green at that angle. Although I didn’t get a picture, I was down there in one of my rounds and the view was very disorienting—I missed my aiming line for the green by about 20 yards!

While nothing too exciting, the seventh is a very pleasant short par 5 crossing an open landscape dotted by trees, some young some very old. The approach is semi-blind if you haven’t hit a long drive. The most important thing here is that you don’t let your approach leak too far right if going for the green because there’s a big wall guarding one of Knole House’s gardens.

Eight is a beautiful downhill par 3 that looks like it’s playing through a garden. Despite the beauty, it’s quite difficult; the green is deep but narrow and has a steep drop-off at its left. The right bunker is certainly no good as the green runs away from there.

Many would probably say that the course begins a bit of a weak stretch with the par 5 ninth. The ground is a bit tamer here and there isn’t so much to drum up interest between the tees and the greens. I actually think that the drive on nine is a pretty tough one. The bunkers on the right are 230 from the standard tees, 250 from the tips and cut pretty far into the fairway. There’s also marshy junk on the other side if you pull it.

I found the 170 yard tenth to be a lovely hole in its simplicity. But there’s a bit more trouble near the green than appears in the form of two bunkers left in addition to the obvious one on the right.

Certainly the most problematic hole at Knole Park is the ~430 eleventh. The hole probably doglegs 75 degrees to the right but it’s almost impossible to cut any of the corner because of the massive oak trees in the corner of the dogleg. So you only want to hit it ~240 out to the left. The longest hitters might be able to go over the trees but anyone who can do that should play the back tee at 485 yards, which I didn’t even know existed until I looked at the club’s website just now.

This is one of those holes that’d be much better if there were bunkers rather than trees on the corner of the dogleg. But these are some very large, old oaks and the tree-loving part of me that says ‘keep ‘em’ probably wins out over the good-golf-hole-loving part of me that knows it’d be a better hole without them.

After three perhaps less-than-great holes, we have three excellent ones. The 200 yard twelfth is excellent. There’s room short over the bunkers to run one on and the green is very unusual, with a ridge running through the back that creates a small back shelf. The back section is barely large enough for a pin placement (it’d be a fun one) and I wonder if this section was either larger and encompassed some of the area behind it that’s now rough or if it wasn’t part of the green in the first place. I’d guess the former.

The 325 yard par 4 thirteenth is very unusual, but in a good way. The drive is uphill, yet there’s a marsh/pond halfway up the hill on the right side starting at about 225. You either need to lay up short, which makes the approach very uphill, play to the left, which is narrow and means you’ll have to contend with a stunted old oak tree left of the green, or carry it, which takes about a 240 yard carry up a hill. It’s one of the more unusual driving holes I’ve seen, but it’s a very good one. It’s also one where the trees planted too close to the fairway on the left actually do a lot to make it interesting by making option (2) more difficult.

The fairway on the long par 4 fourteenth is wide open but its right side kicks right and it’s quite easy to end up in the rough on a downslope on the right. If you hit the fairway, you’ll have a good view of what’s probably both the course’s most picturesque and interesting approach. It’s a bit tough to run one up here but the shot plays about 25 feet downhill, so it’s probably one or two clubs less than usual.

I mentioned that the club should combine the first and second holes into a par 5 and stick a par 3 in somewhere else. My suggestion would be here, playing from just left of the fourteenth green down to the base of the hill behind the green, just to the right of the fifteenth tee. This would make for a hole of ~150 yards, which would add some variety to the par 3s, all of which currently require at least a mid-iron.

Knole Park’s most Addington-like moment in terms of severity comes at the par 5 fifteenth. It’s a very tough drive from the back tee; you need about 230 to carry the ridge on the right side but if you shy away to the left, you can get stuck behind a grove of trees on the left that starts at ~280.

It’s critical that you hit a good drive here because otherwise, you won’t be able to carry your second up the massive hill in front of the green. Google Earth say that it’s only about a 20ft. rise—it felt like at least twice that. If you go for it and don’t make the carry, your ball can run well off to the left. If you can’t make it, you’ll have to lay back to ~150 and have a shot that’s so uphill that you will wonder if you can even hit your short iron high enough. Very difficult hole for shorter hitters or those who miss their drive.

Sixteen completes Knole Park’s sextet of difficult par 3s (the shortest is #10 at 170 and the other five are all >190). This 200-yarder might be the most difficult of the bunch. The difficulty here is that if you miss your long-iron/hybrid by even a little bit, the ground is likely to carry the ball down the hill to the right, almost to the junk. But the bunker left is about 20 yards short of the green and you can use the ground past it to run one onto the green. It’s an excellent hole and I’d say probably the best of the par 3s.

Each of the par 3s at Knole Park is a good hole in its own right but as a set, they’re a bit too difficult and lacking a bit in variety, with 4 and 5-irons all day. I love courses with six par 3s but unfortunately this is a case of the whole being less than the sum of its parts. The Addington also has six par 3s and that set is superior to Knole Park’s (and almost any other course) in good part because of the variety of lengths.

The 540 yard par 5 seventeenth is a tricky driving hole because the fairway slopes gently away on the left and more steeply away on the right. It’s best to play this one just off the trees to the left because there’s a hidden string of bunkers on the right from 220-270.

The approach is downhill over a valley and you’ll need to be able to carry to with about 110 yards of the green to carry it. But we’re on high ground here and if you’re playing in the summer, the ball rolls a lot, making this hole play much shorter than the yardage. In one of my rounds, I had probably 230 to the green and cold chunked a 4-iron. I almost didn’t find the ball…because it had rolled all the way to the back of the green.

The 400 yard eighteenth features another of those lovely English drives: completely blind over a hill about 80 yards in front of the tee. Even though they could have put the tee on high ground left of the seventeenth green, they stuck it in this ditch near the boundary wall. I love it. I wish we had more drives like this in the US.

But that’s really the only interesting thing about the drive because the fairway is wide-open. The second shot…definitely not one of my favorites over a small pond. Altogether, not a very inspired finishing hole, especially for such an inspirational course.

Over two visits and four total rounds, I always found Knole Park to be one of the most enjoyable courses in the London area. It’s beautiful, a very pleasant walk, and there are several very nice holes (and one all-world one, the sixth). Reflecting on it a few years later though, it just doesn’t have the strengths of London’s best. The bunkering is fine, but nothing too special in its placement or shaping. Generally they’re a bit too small, not fitting the scale of the property. The shaping on an around the greens is also a bit weak. Now the London courses generally aren’t known for their greens contouring, but the best ones all have interesting mounds and hollows that create a lot of interest throughout. Unfortunately, Knole Park doesn’t have any of that.

Like The Addington, I suspect that Knole Park has become a bit degraded from Abercromby’s original course. It’d be interesting to see what this course looked like in its early years. Hopefully the club will have a look at this and consider making changes to get the course closer to its original presentation if it has in fact gotten away from this. One thing that it could definitely use is tree removal. There are plenty of stately old oaks that should remain, but too many landscape trees have been planted over the years and both interfere with several shots that would be plenty interesting without them and clutter the otherwise dramatic landscape.

Still Knole Park is one of the London area’s most pleasant courses, easy to get to from the city, and is a nice contrast in style to the more prominent heathland courses. If you’re spending some time in London and have an afternoon to get away to play some golf, I’d highly recommend it.

Another train ride well out into the south England countryside brings us to Royal Ashdown Forest, a course located on crown land, which apparently came with the stipulation that no artificial constructions can be made. It’s that condition which has created the course’s greatest source of fame: its lack of sand bunkers. Although as I’ve said before, I’m not much into historical golf course research and haven’t investigated it, this aspect of Royal Ashdown Forest is a puzzle to me because while there aren’t any sand-filled bunkers, there are all sorts of earthworks, including plenty of bunkers that just aren’t filled with sand. So unless the royal charter (or whatever the document is called) says ‘no sand’ specifically, I don’t really get the lack of sand.

But one thing that I believe in is that ‘less is often more’ and I like the idea of a course without sand. While most courses without sand don’t have it because they’re low-budget courses and don’t want the maintenance costs, this is certainly not the case with Royal Ashdown Forest. This is a serious club and the course is as stern as most of top courses in the London area. If you the architect are committed to not using sand, you’ll have to devise other ways to create interest, namely in the shaping of the ground to create interesting features. And there’s certainly a lot of this here, most (although not always) to great affect. But because so much of the shaping looks like shaping we typically find around sand bunkers, if you didn’t know that the course was sand-less, you might not realize it.

Probably the best thing about Royal Ashdown Forest is the land that it sits on: big and heavily rolling with some fantastic vistas across neighboring grazing land and beautiful streams that make for some interesting (and challenging) shots. This is certainly one of the most beautiful courses that I played in England. Couple that with some very interesting earthworks and a variety of green shapes and you have some seriously interesting golf. Would the course be better with a few sand bunkers? Maybe, but maybe not. I certainly didn’t miss them. There are a few architectural quirks that I could do without but the lack of sand isn’t at the top of the list.


Being English, the course must have its share of oddities. One of these comes at the first hole, a 350 yard downhill par 4 that crosses over the eighteenth hole. Long hitters can run out of room and into the trees on the left but the best play here is something controlled up the right. That’s because the green is steeply two-tiered from high-left to low-right. Being up the right side will allow you to play into rather than down the slope.

It’s possible to get lost on the way to the second as you have to walk about 175 yards down a neighborhood road. Once you get to the end of it, you come to a 385 yard hole with a very English (uphill and blind) drive. It’s important to aim up the right side of the fairway because it slopes left and you can run out of room there.

The approach looks like something that may have inspired Pete Dye: downhill to a green fronted by wooden boards. More an issue is that the green slopes back-to-front and that you don’t want to be long.

The short par 4 third gives you some teeing ground options: 315 yards and straight-away from a tee just behind the second green or a 100 yard walkback to a slightly more awkward 330 yard dogleg left. It’s a pretty simple hole in either case but the higher visual intimidation of the latter offsets the walkback and is probably the better of the two.

The green is surrounded by a variety of odd mounds. Not sure why this construction was ok but sand bunkers weren’t.

Although it’s another fairly short par 4, I liked the uphill fourth. The fairway narrows with a road and heather about 250 from the tips so again, a lay-up club is prudent. It’s a lovely uphill approach to a deep but fairly narrow green with a hedge at its left.

While the first few holes have been pleasant, none is really anything special. That starts to change with the downhill, 515 yard par 5 fifth. Feel free to swing away here (unless you tend to slice) because the green is quite reachable in two, even if the course isn’t playing firm.

The approach is a beauty, over a meandering stream about 15 yards short of the green. The stream is in the perfect place for those considering going for it. There’s a little room short so you don’t need a perfect shot, but it needs to be solid. The green is also over 100 ft. deep making it possible to hold from long distance. A very fine par 5.

And the short par 3 sixth is even better. About 120 yards to a deep but narrow green perched over a stream on the left and a hollow on the right, this is one of the best short par 3s that I’ve seen. Part of this is that the construction of the green is one of the best that I’ve seen, with both interesting interior contours and contouring at the edges.

You’d think that this would compete for the best sixth hole in the country but there’s a lot of sixth hole competition, with world class sixth holes at Knole Park, Sunningdale—New, and Royal North Devon.

The excellent golf continues with the mid-length, uphill par 4 seventh, which plays over the back part of the sixth green. It’s an excellent driving hole because if bold, you can cut off a lot of the junk (and it’s really nasty stuff) up the right. But the fairway slopes to the left and the hole doglegs right so if it’s firm and you pull it a bit, your drive could run into the woods on the left. Again, a conservative drive is prudent.

The green is a simple circle with a false front that sits in a lovely amphitheater.

Eight is another fairly short par 5 with lots of trouble. The fairway narrows to a ribbon at ~280 so again, you shouldn’t just bomb away. From here, regardless of whether you go for it or lay up, you have an interesting shot. The green is deep, but narrow and tucked in a hollow surrounded by all kinds of mess. I really wouldn’t suggest going for the green in two unless you have a very manageable shot because the green is small and the stuff right of it might as well be a pond. If you lay up, it’s far better to be up the left side.

Nine is an uphill, ~140 yard par 3 with a fairly large green. Should be simple but miss a bit short or a bit long and again, there’s all kinds of junk.

When most who’ve played it think back on Royal Ashdown Forest, they probably think most about the stretch 10-12. These are three of the most beautiful holes in the country and to my mind, three of the best.

The par 5 tenth is probably the weakest of this set. It’s a good driving hole; not too demanding with the trouble being obvious.

But it gets much trickier on the approach. The fairway rises to a peak ~130 yards short of the green and everything past that point is blind, making for an awkward lay up. This was also probably my least favorite green on the course, awkwardly cut into the base of a hill. Not a bad hole, but definitely not my favorite.

The 250 yard downhill par 3 eleventh though…definitely one of my favorites. I think that this is one of the best long par 3s in England. It’s about 50 feet down hill so it always plays much shorter than the yardage and if the ground is really firm, you’d have to land your shot well short of the green.

The greatness here (apart from the obvious beauty) is that the slope of the land requires you to be careful with the shape and placement of your shot. A bit too far right and you can get stuck in the heather. But something landing a bit too far left in the fairway will kick left. The right edge of the green is perfect for a straight ball that you want to run in while a fade would be best for those strong enough to carry all the way to the green.

The long par 5 twelfth is probably Royal Ashdown Forest’s most famous hole and for good reason: it’s in the top handful of best par 5s that I’ve played. While it was obvious from pictures that I’d seen before that the fairway slopes right-to-left, I didn’t realize just how severe the slope was. You can really hit a long ball if you can sling a draw but, especially if it’s dry, you have to be careful because you could run all the way down to the trees on the left.

While the hole is stunning and the drive is excellent, from a thinking golfer’s standpoint, the second shot might be the most interesting. The first issue is that if you haven’t hit a good drive, you’ll have difficulty carrying the junk that crosses the fairway from 130-170 short of the green. But even if this isn’t an issue, this second landing area is much narrower and the closer you get to the green, the more heather-covered mounds there are up the left. The more aggressive the second shot, the more precise you must be.

At this point, the course has been on quite a run. 5-12 is one of the better nine (well…eight) hole stretches that you’ll ever see. Unfortunately the course cannot keep up the pace in the last six, which contain several awkward holes that to me keep the course from being one of the top heathland courses.

Thirteen is probably my least-favorite of this bunch. It’s just an odd hole—and not in a good way. From the tips, it’s only about 240 to a road that crosses the fairway and you can’t go further than this because it’s all heather on the other side. But unless you hit it at least ~200 yards, you also don’t reach the fairway. Add in the fact that a tree and other junk block the left side of the hole from the tips pushing you out to the right (where you can get stuck behind more trees) and you have one of my least-favorite driving holes anywhere.

The approach and the green are nice, but they can’t save the hole from being one of my least-favorite--of a sample very biased toward great courses--in England.

After an almost 250 yard walk to the tee, the downhill, ~200 yard fourteenth is much better. It’s actually an excellent hole, capping off what might be a world-class set of par 3s. The main interest comes from all the odd humps and hollows surrounding the green. You have to be accurate, but the green is quite deep.

Fifteen is another awkward, but good short par 4. No matter where you drive it, the approach is blind to a large green in a hollow fronted by heather. Because I inexplicably didn’t take a photo of this lovely green, a screenshot from the video of the hole on the club’s excellent website will have to do.

I found the ~410 yard, uphill sixteenth to be pretty brutal in the soft conditions. You really need a long drive here but not too long because the fairway narrows at ~285 yards (certainly not an issue for me). The reason is that green is fronted by heather-covered mounds and you can’t run one on. While there’s a bit more room left on the approach, it’s hard to tell from the fairway because most everything up by the green is blind.

I didn’t love this hole in my two playings, but there’s plenty of room to lay up if you can’t carry to the green. And I guess there’s nothing wrong with the shot being very demanding for those who can.

Along with the twelfth, the long par 4 seventeenth appears to be Royal Ashdown Forest’s other hole most often cited as great. This is because of the heroic approach to a narrow green benched in the side of a hill, calling for a shot that uses the slope short of the green to run it on.

I respectfully dissent. I found the hole to be very awkward. The drive is completely blind with only an aiming marker to guide the way. But there’s trouble even if you hit the fairway because it slopes pretty good to the left and it’s easy to run into the junk on the left. I’d say that the best play is something a bit left of the aiming marker with a decent fade.

I also don’t think that the approach works as well in practice as it does in theory. The problem is that the land short of the green is too steep. It’s so steep that it isn’t maintained as fairway because balls would just collect at the low-end. I think that it’s also probably too steep to be able to judge the kick off it. On top of that, a maintenance path crosses in front of the green where you’d want to land the ball. Some people might find this charming in a St.Andrew’s-kind-of way. I just thought that it made an already-clunky shot clunkier. Like the tenth green, I also find this one awkwardly cut into too-steep a slope. So it may be one of many others’ favorite holes at Royal Ashdown Forest, but it certainly isn’t one of mine.

Unfortunately the course closes with another unusual hole that I don’t like. I can’t think of a hole that has less fairway in the places where you’d expect fairway to be and more in places that don’t. From the tips, it’s about 210 yards to carry the junk up the left side but then, like the thirteenth hole, only about another 30 until you ran into junk crossing the fairway. And most of the fairway is to the right of where it should be. Unless you’re in the leftmost part of the fairway, you’ll have an awkward angle to a green that runs diagonally front-left to back-right and could be blocked by trees on the right.

But looking at the hole on Google Earth, it looks like since my most recent visit (fall 2017), the club may have cut down all of the long grass that bisected the fairway and continued up the fairway up to the green. This simple fix would have made the hole substantially better although it looks like the left side is still long grass. Ideally, the fairway would be up to about 20 yards from the hedge next to the clubhouse because the left side is the best angle into the green. But I can understand that the club might not want to do that to save on their window replacement bills.

Royal Ashdown Forest gets a lot of very positive reviews from the likes of Tom Doak, Ran Morissett, and other well-travelled people. I think that I’m a bit less impressed. There’s no doubt that the course has a handful of the best holes in England and the shaping around the greens is unusual but very interesting and (for the most part) very good.

Still, there’s a lot of awkwardness here that the course could do without. Some of it might be simple to fix. It looks like the club may have already fixed the eighteenth hole. I think that fixing the thirteenth hole would just be a matter of some tree and brush removal on the left side (although that still wouldn’t make it a favorite). And maybe it’s just a matter of expanding some of the mowing lines (like around the sixteenth green) so that it’s easier to take advantage of some of the slopes and give some alternative routes to those who can’t pull off the preferred shot.

But these comments are ultimately nitpicky. It’s undeniable that Royal Ashdown Forest is an excellent course overall, certainly one that you should go see if you’re spending any time in the London area. I’m not sure how many other bunkerless courses I’ve played that were any good, so this is probably the best by default. But I’d throw out the ‘bunkerless’ novelty when thinking about this course. The variety of humps, hollows, and covering vegetation create at least as much interest and challenge as sand on other courses. So what you have is one of the most beautiful courses in England which, for its faults, has consistently interesting shaping with several great holes including a few that are likely among the best of their type in the world. Sounds pretty good to me.


Note: There’s also a full 18-hole relief course at Royal Ashdown Forest, the West Course, that’s also worth playing. The front nine has some very nice holes and while a few holes are short and awkward, there’s some interesting terrain and a few great shots on the back. For some reason, I didn’t take any pictures but if you’re doing a multi-round day at Royal Ashdown Forest—especially if you’re playing >36 holes—I’d consider doing a round on the West Course.

While no one seems to think it’s the best of the UK's inland courses, Woking has always been of special interest to golf course architecture enthusiasts outside of the UK. It’s notable as an early example of great redesign work, as members John Low and Stuart Paton went through the course hole-by-hole in the early 20th century, adding bunkers to make the holes more strategic and reshaping greens to make them more interesting. Many of these revisions (i.e. the centerline fourth hole fairway bunkers) remain interesting to this day and result is a course that, despite being on one of the less-interesting properties of the great heathland courses, is one of the most interesting.

Although Woking is an excellent course from tee-to-green, it’s most notable for its greens which are easily the best set of the London heathland courses and are perhaps the best set in the whole southeast England, with only those at Royal St. George’s and Royal Cinque Ports as competitors. Now great greens come in many forms—they can be large and wild like those at St. Andrews or smaller with a lot of smaller rolls like the sixteenth at Royal Cinque Ports.

But Woking’s green contours stand out as unique in my experience. While several are large and have more standard contours (like tiers), many are contoured unlike anything I’ve seen before, from the seven or eight small tiers of the twelfth green, to the hourglass-shaped tiers of the thirteenth green, to the bizarre nose-shaped tier that comes into the middle of the fifteenth green. And even some of the less contoured greens are genius in their simplicity and functionality—the green on the long par 4 seventeenth, falling gently from front-right to back-left, favoring a shot from the left side of the fairway is exemplary of this.

That sure sounds to me like a course that could contend for the top spot, even in a place with as many great courses as the London heathlands! But I don’t think that it’s quite up to the level of Sunningdale-Old, West Sussex, or Swinley Forest from tee-to-green and I think it lacks a bit of their beauty and charm as well. Having said that, I’m writing this review almost six years after my two visits to the course. I know that the club has been making a lot of improvements since, removing trees and adding heather (the club pro told me that if it were up to him, he’d turn it into Oakmont, removing all the trees!). So it’s possible that Woking has gained some ground on what to me were the top heathland courses since then.


Woking has a very unusual starting hole, but one that I really like—a 275 yard par 4 with a shallow green that falls away to the back. The drive is blind as far the last 60 or 70 yards of the hole but if you do the smart thing and hit it ~200 yards, you’ll be fine.

Problems start if you try to get it on or near the green. Bunkers left and trees/gorse pinch the fairway at about 225 yards. If you go for it, the ideal drive would be just over the right edge of the left fairway bunkers. The pro Carl (who has an outstanding guide on how to play each hole on the club’s website) told me that the best way to play this hole in the summer is to go over the green and pitch back uphill. Not my favorite hole as a starter, but an excellent hole in its own right.

While the first is a par 3 1/2 masquerading as a par 4, the second is a par 3 1/2 masquerading as a par 3—about 225 yards over a shallow valley with 2 bunkers short-right and a green with a tier running diagonally from front-left to back-right. While I don’t believe those elements have changed, my pictures don’t do the current hole justice as the club has removed the oak tree and the hedge left of the green (which Carl hated) which has been replaced by heather.

The long par 4 third has been singled out by Tom Doak and others as one of Woking’s best holes. It’s certainly difficult—the hole doglegs right but the fairway slopes right-to-left, so you really need to hit a good drive to get within decent firing range of the green.

You also need distance off the tee because the green is fronted by a bunker and, unless the conditions are firm, needs to be approached from the air. Unfortunately both times that I visited Woking—early spring and summer 2016—the course was soft. The green is small and almost cruelly contoured for such a long par 4.

Perhaps even more noteworthy is the short par 4 fourth, noteworthy for Low and Paton’s centerline bunkers between 240 and 260 from the tips. Although it may not matter so much these days, especially when the green is soft, the tilt of the green from left-to-right favors an approach from the right side.

This was the site of one of my prouder moments on a golf course. After stupidly driving it in  one of the bunkers in my second round, I knocked by ~110 yard approach to about 10 ft., drawing a round of applause from my gallery of 1 maintenance crew guy.

Five is another short (~360 yard) par 4 which again, shouldn’t be too difficult if you’re conservative off the tee. The fairway narrows between heather right and a bunker left at ~250. The real feature here is the wild 4-ish tiered green, of which I unfortunately don’t have a useful picture.

The 420 yard par 4 sixth turns the screws off the tee, with bunkers starting at 230 on the right and another at 260 on the left. This is undoubtedly Woking’s toughest driving hole. If you haven’t hit a good drive, the approach is very difficult because while the green is large, it’s fronted by a stream that meanders from its front-left to right. Unlike most of Woking’s other great greens, this one is great for its subtlety—you’re going to have to figure out what to make of a lot of little humps and bumps if you’re too far from the hole.

Seven is 160 yards to a green bunkered front-left and right. But again, the green is the star here and it’s different from any of the others. The primary features were mounds intruding into the putting surface left, right, and long. Putts across the middle of the green weren’t too hard but the mounds made most chips quite difficult.

The drive on the 445 yard eighth is one of the more generous on the course (but don’t miss right). The real challenge is the elegant uphill approach, over several heather-edged bunkers. The one left is a few yards short of the green and there’s definitely room to run the ball on. I remember this green being similar to eight in that it was large and full of subtle contours, although it also slopes back-to-front.

The 470 yard ninth is probably the most controversial hole at Woking and in talking with Carl, it seemed that they wanted to change it, but weren’t sure what to change it to.

I actually didn’t mind it. It is a very awkward drive, uphill with a large pine at the corner of the dogleg-left and a fairway sloping right toward a large oak tree on the right. Long hitters can carry the tree, but that requires a drive that’s near it’s apex at 225 yards—not easy for most of us. The rest of us need to be clever, either threading a drive, shaping a draw off the oak, or laying back. While the approach is very uphill, there isn’t trouble short so you can hit it from long range with a good shot.

It’s a very tough hole but it’s completely playable if you’re smart and execute reasonably well.

Ten is similar in length to seven but there’s even more of a premium on accuracy here—if you miss left, your ball could run well down the hill toward the woods. And if you miss right, your second from the bunkers could run well down the hill toward the woods…

Eleven, a par 4 of 400 yards, is just a very solid hole. It’s pretty clear from the tee what the main issue is here—the hole doglegs right but the fairway slopes (pretty good) to the left. You either need to work a fade or lay back. The approach is gently uphill to a well-defended green.

Carl thought that the drive on the 415 yard twelfth was a bit of a weakness and I agree. He thought that they should add some fairway bunkers, I suggested bringing the heather in on the right.

But maybe it makes sense that the drive is easy because the green is the wildest on this and probably almost any other course. It’s pretty hard to describe; broadly speaking, it’s sort-of three-tiered with a high left and low right side. But the green also slopes front-to-back and each broad section of the green has tiers within, creating six or seven sections. This green must be on any short list of the best greens in the world.

Yet as far as originality is concerned, the thirteenth green is right up there with it. This 435 yard par 4 begins underneath a large chestnut tree and doglegs left around a bunker at ~210 and some very thick heather. Like on nine, you can get stuck behind trees if you go too far up the right. This is one of Woking’s most challenging driving holes.

I suppose that the green could be described as a double plateau, with high tiers front-left and back-right. But on standard double-plateau greens, the middle of the green is just a trough. Not so here. The lower front-right and back-left sections fan out, creating bowls rather than a channel. I’m not sure that the back-left bowl is large enough for a pin placement, but there are several at the front-right. I’d love to see a 3-D diagram of this green. It may not be quite as interesting as the twelfth, but it’s second-to-none in originality.

The 550 yard par 5 fourteenth is a favorite because of the proximity of the green to the clubhouse and the local rule that you have to play a shot from the patio, proshop, roof or wherever else your ball might end up.

But the hole isn’t just about the green. It’s a challenging, diagonal drive over heather. If you end up in it, it’ll be tough to get past the fairway bunkers that encroach from the right at 350. The run into the green is wide-open and the hole shouldn’t be too hard if you hit a good drive. But don’t overshoot the approach!

Fifteen is another (shorter) par 5 with heather off the tee, this time mostly on the left. This is one of the tighter driving holes and again, if you hit a poor drive, you’ll have to carry a patch of heather that cuts into the fairway ~150 yards short of the green.

But while all of that is fairly interesting, it has nothing on the green, which is one of the most eccentric of all. Probably the simplest description of it is that it has a higher, horseshoe-shaped tier around the back with a big hump in the middle of the lower front tier. But this hump is sort-of connected to the back tier and I came to think of the green over the course of my four plays as like a face—the back tier is the forehead and the bump in the front is the nose, connected to the forehead by a lower bridge. Maybe I'm getting a bit carried away with the description, but there’s no doubt that the green is unusual and interesting…and great.

The par 3 sixteenth had just been completely redone before my visit. It used to play to a deep, narrow green right of the pond, but they built a new one left of the pond because people kept hitting cars on the road to the right of the old one. While it creates about a 110 yard walk to the seventeenth tee, I really liked the new hole. They clearly focused on replicating the wildness of some of the other greens although the bump in the back-middle of the green was really taking a beating from the lawnmowers and foot traffic. Hopefully they’ve figured that out since.

While most of the best holes at Woking are that because of heavily contoured greens, the 430 yard seventeenth is great because of its subtlety. In fact, this is one of the best subtle holes that I’ve played. It plays over flat ground and the only real features are two bunkers short and right of the green.

​But unless you’re a very long hitter, these bunkers entirely dictate how you should play the hole. They block the direct line of an approach from the right side of the fairway and the green also slopes slopes away from you at this angle, from front-right to back-left. This is one of the best examples of a lay-of-the-land, fall-away green that I’ve seen and to me, this hole represents a completely different gear for the course—creativity and greatness in subtlety rather than boldness.

The short par 4 eighteenth is a bit less demanding than some of what’s come before although you want to be careful not to use too much of the generous bailout area left off the tee—the green is three-tiered from high-left to low-right and it’ll be much more difficult from the left side of the fairway to play to left pins (which are also protected by two oak trees) or to stop your ball if playing to those in the center or on the right.

I wasn’t sure after six years how sharp my memory would be or how well the inspiration would flow in writing about Woking. Neither was an issue. I actually thought I had more pictures than I did because I’m remembering things of which I thought I had pictures, but didn’t. Still, more than any course I’ve played, I wish I had photographed Woking with a good camera rather than my iPhone because the greens deserve to be seen in as much detail as possible. The only course that I’ve seen with as much originality in the green contours is the South Course at Oakland Hills and we all know what company that course keeps (especially now with the Gil Hanse redo).

As for how Woking compares with its more local peers, I agree with the consensus that it’s the best of the 3 Ws. While it may be on the least interesting terrain of the 3, it obviously blows them away at the greens. But it might also be the best from tee-to-green. There aren’t a ton of fairway bunkers but several fairways pinch in critical spots while others have reverse cambers that demand thoughtful shaping. While Woking gets and deserves most of its attention for its greens, it’s a very good driving course.

Still, I’m reluctant to put Woking in the top 5 London-area heathlands, which for me would probably be the two Sunningdales, West Sussex, Swinley Forest, and St. George’s Hill. Now the first thing you’d notice about that group is that 4 of the 5 routinely make world top 100 lists, so it’s a pretty high bar (and the one that doesn’t—West Sussex—probably should). But those courses are all on more interesting terrain than Woking and have a bit more design interest from tee-to-green. It’s difficult to match the use of terrain as a driving challenge at St. George’s Hill, the fairway bunkering of West Sussex, or the tee-to-green variety and oddness of Sunningdale-Old.

Still, if you have to spend some mental energy thinking about why Woking might not quite be up to the standard of those courses, it’s clearly a great course. Many have noted that it’s one of the first courses an architecture enthusiast visiting London should see and I completely agree with that. As a practical matter, it’s also one of the easiest courses to reach from the city because most of the express trains going southwest run from Victoria Station straight to Woking Station, from which it’s just a short cab ride to the course.