Heathland Golf Courses In England: A Complete Guide

Dig a hole anywhere on Chobham Common and you hit yellow sand within a spade's depth. That is the whole explanation for why a strip of land running from west Surrey through east Berkshire into north Hampshire, thirty miles across and agriculturally worthless for most of recorded history, ended up carrying more first-rate golf courses per square mile than anywhere else in England. Nobody could farm it. Somebody could build on it, cheaply, and in the last decade of the nineteenth century somebody did.

Heathland golf is the English contribution to golf course architecture. The Scots had the coast and the links that came with it; England had this, and a generation of architects who worked out between roughly 1900 and 1930 what to do with it. The result is a type of course with the firmness of a links, the shelter of an inland course, and a rough made of a woody shrub that will happily snap the shaft of a wedge.

What actually defines a heathland course

Four things, and they are all consequences of the soil.

The subsoil is acidic sand and gravel — in Surrey and Berkshire, the Bagshot Formation, an Eocene deposit that also produced the pine woods and the commons. It is nutrient-poor, free-draining and mildly acidic, which is exactly the range in which heather thrives and most other plants struggle.

The vegetation follows. Ling heather, the low purple-flowering Calluna vulgaris, is the dominant plant, with bell heather and cross-leaved heath in wetter or drier patches. Gorse fills the gaps. Scots pine and silver birch colonise anywhere that is not grazed, burnt or cut, which is the source of the management problem discussed further down this page.

The turf is fine-leaved — fescues and bents, the same families that grow on a links, for the same reason. Poor sandy soil suits them and disadvantages the coarser grasses that would otherwise crowd them out.

And the topography is gently rolling rather than dramatic. Heaths sit on old river terraces and low gravel ridges. There are no dunes and very few genuinely severe changes in level, which is why heathland courses are generally comfortable to walk even at seventy-two years old.

Miss any one of these and you have something else. A course on sand with no heather is a sandy inland course. A course with heather planted along the edges of a clay fairway is a parkland course with a decorative border, and the first wet February will demonstrate the difference.

The golden age architects who found the heath

The chronology is unusually tidy. Willie Park Junior laid out the Old Course at Sunningdale, which opened in 1901, and it demonstrated that inland golf in England did not have to mean a flat field with cross-hazards. Herbert Fowler followed at Walton Heath, opening in 1904, on ground so bare and open that early photographs look like moorland with flags in it. James Braid took the professional's job at Walton Heath and held it for the rest of his working life, which gave the club a shop window it has never lost.

• 1901Sunningdale Old
• 1904Walton Heath
• 1923Sunningdale New

Opening dates of the courses named in this section, not the dates of later remodelling or extension.

Harry Colt is the central figure. He was secretary at Sunningdale before he was an architect, which meant he watched a heathland course settle in and then spent thirty years applying what he had learned. Swinley Forest, the New Course at Sunningdale which opened in 1923, St George's Hill at Weybridge, Camberley Heath, Blackmoor in Hampshire, the two courses at Wentworth in the 1920s — the list of English heathland courses Colt either built or substantially altered runs well into double figures.

Around them worked Tom Simpson, John Abercromby, Herbert Fowler again at The Berkshire, and at Woking the amateur pair of John Low and Stuart Paton, whose decision to put two bunkers in the middle of the fourth fairway is still argued about a century later. Alister MacKenzie, before Augusta and Cypress Point, cut his teeth on Yorkshire heath at Alwoodley.

What they shared was a method. Route the holes through the existing heather and pine rather than clearing them; use the natural fall of the ground for green sites; put the hazards where the good player wants to go rather than where the poor player will end up. It is the opposite of the earthmoving approach that came later, and the reason these courses have needed so little alteration.

Why heathland drains almost like a links

The mechanism is the same as on the coast, minus the salt. Rain falling on a sand and gravel profile percolates downwards under gravity until it reaches the water table. There is no clay pan to stop it. Compare that with a parkland course on London Clay, where water reaching the top of the clay has nowhere to go and sits in the rootzone until it evaporates.

The playing consequences are large and immediate.

Winter golf is real golf. Heathland clubs typically stay on their main greens all year, run few or no temporary holes, and impose preferred lies only during genuinely wet spells rather than as a standing arrangement from November. Our guide to winter golf rules in England sets out how preferred lies, temporary greens and mats actually work under the Rules.

Summer golf gets firm and fast. In a dry July a heathland fairway will give thirty or forty yards of run and the greens will need to be watered hand-tight or they will not hold anything. The clubs that manage this well are, in practice, running a links maintenance regime a long way from the sea.

Recovery from wear is quicker. Sand does not rut. Trolley traffic and winter footfall mark heathland turf far less than they mark clay, which is one reason heathland clubs tend to be relaxed about trolleys in months when parkland clubs ban them.

There is a limit to the comparison. Heathland courses are sheltered by trees and sit further from the moderating effect of the sea, so they hold frost longer on cold mornings than a links does. A hard frost closes a Surrey heath as readily as it closes anywhere else, and heathland clubs lose more mornings to frost delay than coastal clubs do.

Heather as a hazard, and what playing from it really involves

Heather looks soft from a distance and is nothing of the sort. The plant is a low woody shrub. The upper eight or ten centimetres are fine green or purple growth; below that is a dense mat of stems with the flexibility of wire.

Three lies are possible and they are not equally bad.

Sitting up on top of the growth, the ball is perched with air beneath it and a normal shot is available, although the stems will still slow the clubhead and the ball will come out with less spin and less distance than the same swing from fairway.

Sitting down in the stems, the ball is playable but only just. The clubhead will be turned by the woody growth, almost always shut, and the shot will come out left and short of anything you were hoping for.

Sitting on bare peaty ground under the canopy — which happens in older, leggier heather — the strike can be clean but the follow-through is not, and the wrists take the shock.

The technique that works is unglamorous. Take a wedge or a nine iron, grip harder than feels comfortable, put the ball back, hinge early, and hit down steeply so the club meets the ball before it meets the shrub. Do not try to help it up. Do not use a long iron on the theory that less loft means less resistance, because it does not, it simply means the club stops sooner.

The honest advice is the same advice every member gives: the objective is short grass, not distance. Two shots to get out of heather is an expensive way to learn a lesson that one sideways wedge would have avoided.

Heather also changes through the year, which visitors rarely allow for. In April the previous season's growth is brittle and the new shoots are short, so a ball will often sit high enough to be worth attacking. By August the plant is in flower, the stand is at its densest, and an identical lie is a chip-out. Old unmanaged heather in late season is the worst of it, deep and tangled and laced through with bracken that hides the ball completely.

Gorse deserves a separate mention because it gets less respect than it should. A ball in the middle of a mature gorse bush is not a difficult shot, it is a lost ball, and reaching in after it costs blood.

1. 1Find the ballIdentify it before touching anything, because moving live heather to search is where penalties start.
2. 2Read how far it has sunkPerched on top of the growth is a shot. Down among the woody stems is not.
3. 3Pick the exitChoose the nearest short grass, which is frequently sideways and occasionally backwards.
4. 4Take enough loftWedge or nine iron, grip firm, ball back, steep into it.
5. 5Or declare it unplayableOne penalty stroke buys a clean lie, and on the heath that is often the cheaper transaction.

The sequence experienced heathland players work through. It is a habit, not a rule of golf.

The rule position on heather

Heather is not an abnormal course condition, a penalty area or anything else that grants relief. It is simply rough, and the ball is played as it lies. Loose impediments such as dead heather stems, twigs and pine cones may be removed, but under the Rules you must not improve your lie, the area of intended swing or your line of play in doing so — and pulling live heather aside from around the ball is precisely the sort of improvement the Rules prohibit. Where the ball is genuinely unplayable, the unplayable ball relief options are available for one penalty stroke, and on a heathland course they are used far more often than most visitors expect.

Bunkering, angles and the argument against length

Heathland architecture is strategic rather than penal, and the bunkering is where that shows.

The classic pattern places a bunker or a heather carry on the inside of a dogleg, at the distance the better player is trying to reach, so that the aggressive line is the one with the risk on it. The safe line leaves a longer approach and, more importantly, a worse angle into a green that is tilted or bunkered to reward one side of the fairway over the other. Nothing forces the choice. The player who lays up is not punished, merely inconvenienced, which is the whole idea.

Green-side bunkers on the heath are usually shallower than links pots and set below the putting surface rather than dug into it, with grassed or heather-clad faces that flow into the surrounds. Colt in particular liked to leave one side of a green completely open so that a running approach from the correct angle was available and a running approach from the wrong angle was not.

This is why so many heathland courses hold up against modern equipment despite being, on the card, short. The defence is not yardage. It is the requirement to be on a specific side of the fairway, which a driver hit hard at the middle does not satisfy.

Design idea	How it appears on the heath	What it asks of the player
Diagonal carry	Heather or a bunker crossing the tee shot at an angle	Choose how much to bite off
Centreline hazard	Bunkers in the middle of the fairway, as at Woking	Commit to one side and accept the consequence
Angled green	Putting surface set across the line of play	Approach from the correct half of the fairway
Open front	No bunker guarding the front on one side	Run the ball in from the right angle only
Fall-away surround	Ground shedding away from the green edge	Miss on the correct side or face a hard chip

The course rating and slope system used under the Rules of Handicapping measures difficulty for a scratch player and for a bogey player separately, and heathland courses often show a wider gap between the two than their yardage would suggest. The strategy costs the better player very little and the average player a great deal, which is exactly what the architects intended.

The Surrey and Berkshire belt

The concentration in the western home counties has no equal in England. Within a radius of roughly twenty miles, centred somewhere near Ascot, sit Sunningdale's two courses, Wentworth's three, Walton Heath's two, Swinley Forest, The Berkshire's Red and Blue, St George's Hill, Woking, West Hill, Worplesdon, New Zealand, Camberley Heath, Hankley Common a little to the south, and a dozen more.

The railway explains the density as much as the geology. The London and South Western line put Woking within an hour of Waterloo, and Sunningdale was a station before it was a golf club — Park's course was built beside it deliberately. Late-Victorian and Edwardian London had money, leisure and a train service, and the heath had nothing else to offer.

Much of this ground is now protected. Large parts of the Surrey, Berkshire and north Hampshire heaths fall within the Thames Basin Heaths Special Protection Area, designated for breeding nightjar, woodlark and Dartford warbler. Clubs on or adjacent to designated land manage their heather under conservation obligations as well as golfing ones, which occasionally puts the two in tension and more often puts them in alignment, since a healthy heath and a good golf course want the same thing.

Detail on individual clubs sits in the dedicated pages: Sunningdale's Old and New courses, Walton Heath and the wider Surrey heath belt guide cover access, character and the holes worth travelling for.

Championship golf on the belt

The heath has staged a good deal of serious competition. Wentworth's West course held the Ryder Cup in 1953 and has for decades been the home of the BMW PGA Championship, the flagship European tour event staged in England. Its heathland credentials are argued over, since generations of tree planting and a good deal of remodelling have made it play more like a woodland course than the heath Colt laid out, but the sand is still under it. Walton Heath staged the Ryder Cup in 1981 and, more recently, the AIG Women's Open in 2023, a championship it prepared for by presenting the course firm and running rather than long and soft. Sunningdale has hosted the Women's British Open on several occasions and remains a regular final qualifying venue.

What these events demonstrate is that heathland courses hold up at the top level without needing to be stretched. The scoring defence is the same one the members face — heather down both sides, greens that shed a ball on the wrong line, and fairways that will not accept a drive aimed vaguely at the middle when the pin is cut behind a bunker on one side.

Heathland beyond the home counties

Treating Surrey as the whole story leaves out some of the best golf in the country.

Region	Courses of note	Character
Nottinghamshire	Notts at Hollinwell, Sherwood Forest	Valley ground, heather banks, big scale
South Yorkshire and Leeds	Lindrick, Alwoodley, Moortown	Limestone and gritstone heath, exposed
Dorset	Broadstone, Parkstone, Ferndown	Sandy, pine-fringed, views to Poole Harbour
Hampshire and the Surrey border	Liphook, Blackmoor, North Hants, Hankley Common	Quiet, unaltered, strongly Colt-influenced
Suffolk and Norfolk	Woodbridge, Aldeburgh, Thetford	Breckland sand, very fast in summer
Cheshire	Delamere Forest	Fowler routing over glacial sand and gravel

Two of these have Ryder Cup history. Moortown, north of Leeds, staged the 1929 match, the first played in Britain. Lindrick, on the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire border, staged it in 1957. Both are heath in the broad sense, though Lindrick sits on magnesian limestone rather than acid sand and has the tighter, faster turf that goes with it — a reminder that the label covers a range of geologies and that "heathland" describes a plant community and a playing character more than a single rock type.

The Breckland courses in Suffolk and west Norfolk are the driest golf in England. Rainfall there is among the lowest in the country and the sand is deep, which produces mid-summer conditions closer to a links than anything else inland. Royal Worlington and Newmarket, nine holes of it, is routinely described as an inland links for precisely that reason.

When the trees win, and what restoration involves

Heathland is not a natural climax habitat. Left alone it becomes woodland, and the process takes decades rather than centuries. Silver birch seeds prolifically and grows fast; Scots pine follows; the canopy closes; the heather beneath it dies for want of light; the ground becomes leaf litter and bracken. A great many English heathland courses spent the middle of the twentieth century quietly turning into second-rate woodland courses without anybody deciding that they should.

Restoration reverses it, and it is more brutal than most members expect. Trees come down in large numbers, often hundreds at a time. Stumps are ground out. The accumulated organic layer is scraped off to expose the mineral sand beneath, because heather seed will not germinate through leaf mould. Heather brash cut from a donor area is spread over the bare sand to sow it. Then the club waits three or four years for anything to look like it worked.

1. 1Fell the invading treesBirch and pine come out in numbers, usually over a winter and usually to protest.
2. 2Grind the stumpsLeft in the ground they resprout, and birch resprouts vigorously.
3. 3Scrape off the litterThe organic layer is stripped to expose mineral sand, because heather seed will not germinate through leaf mould.
4. 4Spread heather brashCut material from a donor stand is laid over the bare sand to seed it.
5. 5WaitThree or four years before it looks like anything, and a good deal longer before it looks old.

The standard sequence of operations described above, not a schedule any particular club follows.

The reaction is predictable and it happens at every club that tries it. Members who joined a tree-lined course object to losing the trees. Photographs from the 1920s showing bare heath do most of the persuading, and clubs that have been through the process almost always publish the before-and-after images for that reason.

The golfing case for it is straightforward. Trees shade greens, which weakens the turf and holds moisture. Roots compete for water. Closed corridors remove the strategic width the architects relied on, so the diagonal carries and alternative angles stop functioning. And a course that has lost its heather has lost the hazard that made it distinctive, replaced by a strip of thin grass under a birch canopy that is neither difficult nor interesting.

Why old heather has to be cut

A heather stand passes through four recognisable phases and only two of them are much use to a golfer. Pioneer heather, in the first years after germination, is short and open — easy to find a ball in and playable out of. Building heather closes up into the dense purple carpet that photographs beautifully and plays like wire. Mature heather starts to thin in the centre. Degenerate heather has collapsed outwards, leaving a woody ring around a bare middle taken over by bracken and moss.

So the management aim is a mosaic of ages rather than one even-aged block across the whole property. That is achieved by cutting or mowing sections on rotation, occasionally by stripping turf back to sand, and historically by controlled burning — a technique now heavily constrained by safety, air quality and the protected status of much of this ground. Golf and conservation pull in the same direction here. A varied-age heath carries more of the invertebrate and bird life the designations were made for, and it also gives a golfer somewhere to find a ball.

The greenkeeping year on a heathland course

Maintaining a heath is an exercise in keeping the soil poor. Every instinct that produces a good parkland surface — feed it, water it, top-dress it with something rich — pushes a heathland green towards exactly the grasses the type exists to avoid.

The target sward is fescue and bent. Both tolerate low fertility, little water and close mowing, and both are outcompeted by annual meadow grass, Poa annua, the moment the surface becomes soft and fertile. Poa germinates in the smallest opening, putts perfectly well in June, and goes patchy and disease-prone in February. Which is why a heathland greenkeeper's programme reads like a list of things deliberately withheld. Nitrogen inputs kept low. Irrigation applied to keep the plant alive rather than to keep the surface looking green. Top-dressing of straight sand, matched to the rootzone beneath it, applied little and often.

Aeration is the year's structural work. Hollow coring lifts organic matter out of the top few centimetres, and on greens that have accumulated thatch it is done in spite of the disruption, because the alternative is a soft water-holding layer sitting on free-draining sand — a parkland problem imported onto a heathland green.

Fairways are handled differently again, and the handling is mostly restraint. Heathland fairways are rarely irrigated across their full width, if at all, and the brown they turn in a dry English summer is a decision rather than a failure. Firm ground gives run, run gives the architecture its options back, and a fairway kept green through August is a fairway that has been softened for the sake of how it photographs.

The two jobs that sit outside the ordinary calendar are the heather and the trees, and both run on cycles measured in years. Course managers on designated land work to a plan agreed with the conservation body, and the working window is closed by bird nesting seasons in a way that greenkeepers on ordinary inland ground never have to think about.

None of it is cheap. A restoration-minded heathland club is funding a tree programme and a heather programme on top of conventional greenkeeping, and the hand-watering that keeps greens alive through a dry spell is labour rather than machinery. What a subscription at a club like that is actually paying for is set out in golf club membership costs in England.

Green complexes and the short game the heath demands

Approach shots on a heathland course frequently finish off the putting surface, by design, and the ground around the green is where the type asks its hardest questions.

Run-offs are the common feature. Greens sit slightly proud of their surrounds so that a ball a fraction long or wide trickles away down a shaved bank, leaving a chip from tight fescue with the surface running away. That shot is uncomfortable for anyone accustomed to the fluffy lies of a parkland course, because there is nothing under the ball and a slightly heavy strike goes nowhere while a slightly thin one goes over the green.

The equipment answer is less loft. A putter from off the surface, or a seven or eight iron played with the hands quiet, gets the ball rolling early and takes the strike out of the equation. A sixty-degree wedge from a tight lie on a downslope is a shot for people who practise it.

Green speed and firmness matter more than contour here. Heathland greens are not usually severely undulating in the way that some modern designs are, but they are quick, they are firm in summer, and the fall-away edges mean that a putt which slips past the hole on the wrong side can finish off the green entirely.

Bunker play differs from links play too. Shallower faces mean the direct shot at the flag is usually available, so the escape-only mindset appropriate to a revetted pot on the coast is the wrong one on the heath. Sand tends to be softer and deeper, which favours a fuller swing and a more open face than most visitors from firm-sand courses use at first.

Heath, links and parkland across one weekend

England is unusual in offering all three types within a short drive of each other in several regions, and playing them back to back is the fastest way to understand what each demands.

	Heathland	Links	Parkland
Subsoil	Acid sand and gravel	Wind-blown coastal sand	Clay, loam or mixed
Rough	Heather, gorse, bracken	Fescue, marram, sea grasses	Thick grass, trees, undergrowth
Wind	Filtered by pine belts	Constant and decisive	Largely blocked
Winter	Playable, main greens	Playable, main greens	Often soft, mats and temporaries
Best approach shot	Land it and let it release	Land it well short and run it	Fly it to the flag and stop it
Chief defence	Angles and heather	Wind and bunkering	Length, trees and water

The transition that catches people out is heath to parkland rather than the other way round. A player who has spent two days landing the ball short and using the ground will fly nothing far enough on soft parkland turf. Going the other way is easier, because a well-struck high approach still works on the heath in most conditions, it simply is not the most reliable option. The links golf explainer covers the coastal end of the same comparison, and the parkland guide the wettest.

Visitor access customs at heathland clubs

Most of the well-known English heathland clubs are private members' clubs that take visitors, and the practical conventions are consistent across the belt.

Weekday golf is generally straightforward; weekend and bank holiday visitor access is restricted at most clubs and unavailable at some. Times are often released a fixed period in advance, and the better-known clubs fill their summer weekday sheets months ahead.

Some clubs require a letter of introduction or ask for a home club and a handicap index, and a handful take visitors only when introduced by a member. Dress codes are enforced, on the course and in the clubhouse, and they are not the same building to building — a jacket requirement in a dining room is still normal at a number of clubs.

Caddies are available at several of the larger clubs and worth taking on a first visit, particularly where heather narrows the effective fairway and the line off the tee is not obvious from the markers.

Mobile telephone rules vary and are usually posted at the entrance. Pace of play expectations are firm, and on the busier heathland courses a four-ball that falls a hole behind will be asked about it.

The mechanics of booking, deposits and what a letter of introduction actually needs to say are covered in visitor access at English golf clubs.

Building an itinerary that does not need long drives

The geography does most of the work for you if you plan around a cluster rather than a wish list.

A Surrey and Berkshire trip works from a base anywhere between Woking and Ascot, with almost everything inside a thirty-minute drive and several courses walkable from a railway station. Three days at two rounds a day is comfortable, and the courses are close enough that a cancelled morning is not a wasted one.

A Dorset trip runs on the Bournemouth and Poole sand, where the heathland courses sit within a few miles of each other and Studland and the coast give a non-golfing afternoon.

A Yorkshire trip around Leeds pairs Alwoodley and Moortown, which share a boundary, with Lindrick and Ganton within an hour, and gives a genuine mix of heath and heath-links hybrid.

The Breckland option, based near Bury St Edmunds or Thetford, is the driest and quietest of the four and the easiest to arrange at short notice.

Two practical points. Heathland clubs generally walk rather than ride, and buggies are restricted or unavailable at many of them, so two rounds a day is a real physical commitment on undulating ground. And spring and early autumn give the best combination of firm turf, available tee times and heather that has not yet grown into its densest summer state — although the heather itself flowers in late summer, which is when the courses look their best and play their hardest. The England hub lists the rest of these guides, and the golf section carries tournament coverage from the courses that host it.