Preferred Lies by Mike Clayton

Author:Mike Clayton
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: ebook
Publisher: Hardie Grant Publishing
Published: 2018-07-15T16:00:00+00:00

ENGLAND: SOME CORNERS OF THEIR FOREIGN FIELDS

In his 40-odd years as a playing professional, golf tourist and course designer, Mike Clayton has teed up in dozens of countries around the world. His favourite for variety, quality and old-fashioned fun? The inland courses of England.

Australia has better weather and the United States has many more great and varied courses, but there is surely no better country to play golf in than England.

It is somewhat mystifying that people will fly all the way across the world to play all the famous links in Ireland and Scotland yet miss so much of the great English golf, much of it inland and far from the coast (well, as far as you can get from the coast in England). Perhaps the English like to keep their best golf to themselves.

Wayne Grady came back from Europe with less-than-effusive praise for English golf after his singularly unsuccessful first foray on the European Tour in 1979. ‘If it wasn’t for black and white stakes you couldn’t play golf in England,’ was Grady’s assessment of what he had found, but he would be the first to admit that most of what he found was on Mondays at the pre-qualifiers – none of which were held at Swinley Forest, Rye, Sunningdale or Ganton.

Ten years later, he would lose The Open Championship in a playoff and that brought about a grudging acceptance on his part that golf in Britain wasn’t all bad. By then he had come to understand it, appreciate it even.

In Scotland and Ireland the links courses are brilliant fun and while everyone knows the famous ones there are so many second-tier links falling into the ‘as good as Barwon Heads’ category. Places like Brora, Fraserburgh, Panmure, Gullane and Nairn are all links worth the time and effort to play. They are neither difficult, unless the wind is up, nor expensive, and in the summer you can still tee off at seven in the evening and make it around easily. The King’s and Queen’s courses at Gleneagles are beautiful places to play golf and provide an experience you won’t find anywhere else in the world. (The new Ryder Cup course across the street, the PGA Centenary Course, however, is indistinguishable from anything you might find in parkland United States, and if you were going all that way to play golf I’m not sure why you’d play it over another round on either the King’s or Queen’s. As my friend John Huggan wrote, it’s ‘the fourth-best course in Auchterarder’.)

But inland golf just isn’t as good in Scotland. The extraordinary scenery that makes it one of the most stunning of countries is hardly conducive to making good golf holes. Unlike Scotland, inland English golf is a joy.

At Swinley Forest, Harry Colt’s 6020-yard, par-69 masterpiece just up the A30 from Sunningdale, there are no signs and the only reliable instruction is to turn left at the small red post box on the corner. It is as good a place as any to

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