Kent Golf Courses Guide: Sandwich Links And Beyond

There is a stretch of coast between Sandwich Bay and Deal, perhaps five miles end to end, that holds three championship links. One of them has staged The Open more than a dozen times. Another staged it once, in 1932, and would probably still be on the rota had a war not intervened. The third hosted it twice before 1921 and has been a serious championship venue ever since. Nowhere else in England packs that much links golf into that little ground.

The reason is geological and dull: a run of dunes and grazing marsh on a stretch of shore that nobody wanted to build on. The consequence is that a golfer can base themselves in one small medieval town and play three great courses without moving the car, which is why Kent works as a golf trip in a way that most English counties do not.

Why the east Kent coast holds so many championship links

Links land is a specific thing. It is the ground between the beach and the farmland — dunes, blown sand, marram grass, thin acidic soil over a sand base, useless for arable and awkward for grazing. Golf occupied it in the nineteenth century because it was available and because the turf was already short.

East Kent has an unusually large continuous run of it. The coast around Sandwich Bay is a low sandy shore with dune ridges running roughly parallel to the sea, backed by reclaimed marsh. Sandwich itself was a Cinque Port and a working harbour until the river silted up and left the town stranded inland, and that silting is precisely what built the golf ground.

The timing helped as well. This coast is close to London, which meant Victorian and Edwardian golfers could reach it, and the boom in club formation in the 1880s and 1890s found the ground ready and empty. Royal St George's was founded in 1887, Royal Cinque Ports in the early 1890s, and Prince's a couple of decades later. The full mechanics of what makes this kind of ground play the way it does are covered in the guide to links golf in England.

What links golf here actually demands

The technical requirements are the same as at any true links and worth restating because most English golfers spend the year on inland courses that ask for the opposite. The ball must be kept low. Approaches must land short and run. Bunkers are penal rather than decorative and the correct play from most of them is sideways. And the wind is not an occasional complication — it is the primary defence.

The bounce is what catches people out. On a soft parkland course the ball stops roughly where it lands, so the yardage is the shot. On firm links turf the ball may run thirty yards, or twenty, or stop dead in a hollow, depending on where it pitches and how the ground is tilting there. The yardage becomes a starting point for a calculation rather than an answer. Players who have spent their golfing lives on inland courses often play three or four holes before they accept this, and by then the card is gone.

Putting from off the green is the other habit worth acquiring before you arrive. Links green surrounds are usually cut tight and firm, and a putter from twenty yards short is a more reliable shot than a wedge for most handicaps. It looks unadventurous. It saves several shots a round.

Royal St George's, Prince's and Deal compared

The three courses sit within a few miles of each other and are frequently spoken about as a set, which obscures how different they are.

• 1894First Open played in England
• 1932The Open at Prince's
• 27Holes at Prince's
• 3Championship links within five miles

Fixed facts about the three clubs and their championship record, not a ranking of them.

Club	Character	Championship record	Visitor access
Royal St George's	Big dunes, blind shots, severe undulation	On The Open rota; first English Open, 1894	Restricted, weekday-focused, book well ahead
Prince's	Flatter, more open, 27 holes	The Open, 1932	The most open of the three
Royal Cinque Ports	Out along the shore and back inland	The Open in 1909 and 1920	Moderate; weekday windows

Royal St George's is the most dramatic and the most divisive. The ground moves violently, several tee shots are blind or semi-blind, and fairway lies can be awkward in a way that offends players who expect a good strike to be rewarded. It is also, by common consent, one of the great courses in the world, and it has its own detailed treatment in the Royal St George's guide.

Prince's is the flattest and most open, with less dune movement and more visibility from the tee. That makes it the easiest of the three to enjoy on a first visit and the most forgiving in serious wind, since you can at least see where the trouble is.

Royal Cinque Ports has the classic out-and-back routing: the front nine runs along the shore in one direction, the back nine returns. In a strong wind this produces the oldest and cruellest structure in links golf, where nine holes are a struggle and the other nine are a different struggle.

Prince's and its three loops of nine

Prince's is arranged as three nines — Shore, Dunes and Himalayas — which can be combined into three different eighteen-hole courses. That structure is unusual in Britain and it is the club's practical advantage.

For a visiting group it means capacity. A club with 27 holes can take substantially more play than one with eighteen without the tee sheet jamming, which is why Prince's is the realistic anchor for a Kent trip and why so many itineraries put a round there at each end.

For a golfer it means variety. The three nines are not identical: one runs closer to the shore, one through more dune movement, and one across flatter ground. Playing two different combinations on consecutive days gives you a genuinely different course each time rather than the same holes twice.

The club's history is worth knowing because it explains the layout. Prince's hosted The Open in 1932, won by Gene Sarazen, and was on a trajectory towards being a regular rota venue. The Second World War ended that. The links were used for military training and were badly damaged, and the course that reopened afterwards, reworked in the 1950s, was not the course that had staged the championship. The Open never came back.

That history sits behind the modern club's identity. Prince's rebuilt itself as an accessible championship-standard links with its own accommodation attached, and it now functions as the practical base for the area rather than as a competitor to its two royal neighbours.

The war damage is also why Prince's plays as it does. A links rebuilt in the 1950s over ground that had been used for military training is a different animal from one that grew incrementally over sixty years. The dune features are less extreme, the routing is more rational, and there is less of the accumulated eccentricity that gives Royal St George's its character. Whether that is a loss or a gain depends entirely on what you want from a round of golf, and there is no correct answer.

Playing the three nines

The three loops can be combined in three ways, and the combinations are not equivalent. One pairing puts you nearest the shore for most of the round and is the most exposed. Another runs through the strongest dune movement the site has. The third is the flattest and the least demanding in wind.

If you are playing thirty-six holes in a day here, the sensible plan is the more exposed combination in the morning while the wind is typically lighter, and the sheltered one in the afternoon. If you are playing one round in a serious blow, ask in the pro shop which combination is playing most kindly. They will tell you, and they will be right.

Royal Cinque Ports at Deal and its championship pedigree

Deal is the connoisseur's choice. Ask serious golfers which of the Sandwich-area links is the best pure golf course and a substantial minority, sometimes a majority, will say Royal Cinque Ports rather than Royal St George's.

The course hosted The Open twice, in 1909 and 1920. It was scheduled to host again and lost the chance more than once — the 1915 championship was cancelled by the First World War, and a later scheduled Open was relocated after flooding damaged the links. Deal sits low and close to the sea, and inundation has been a recurring problem across its history.

What makes it good is the honesty of the golf. Where Royal St George's asks you to accept blind shots and unpredictable bounces, Deal puts most of its difficulty in front of you: long two-shot holes, greens set into low dune shelves, and a closing stretch that is among the hardest in England when the wind is against.

The out-and-back routing is the defining feature. Going out along the shore with a following wind, the course can feel almost gentle. Turning for home into the same wind, the same holes become a different game entirely, and the closing four or five holes have wrecked more good rounds than any comparable stretch on this coast.

The tactical implication is worth stating plainly, because visitors get it wrong. On an out-and-back links you are not playing eighteen holes of similar difficulty. You are playing nine holes on which you must build a score and nine on which you must protect it. If the outward half is downwind and you turn in level par feeling comfortable, you have almost certainly under-scored, because the homeward half is going to take shots off you whatever you do. Good players on this coast attack when the wind allows and defend when it does not, and they decide which is which on the first tee rather than the tenth.

Deal and Sandwich as neighbours

The two royal clubs are separated by a few miles of shore and by a difference in temperament that regulars find easy to describe and hard to justify. Royal St George's is the grander institution and the championship venue. Royal Cinque Ports is the club golfers talk about in the bar afterwards. Both are private members' clubs with restricted visitor windows, both expect a handicap, and both are booked well in advance in summer.

The sea wall and the ongoing problem

Deal's relationship with the sea is not settled history. Coastal defence on this stretch of shore is a live engineering question, and the club, like several English links, has a permanent interest in it. Golf clubs on this coast are among the more visible stakeholders in shoreline management, and it is one of the practical pressures on English links golf that The R&A's own course-management work identifies.

Wind exposure, seasons and when to come

East Kent's exposure is different from the west-coast links. The prevailing wind in Britain is south-westerly, and on this coast that comes off the land, moderated by whatever it has crossed. The wind that defines Kent golf is the other one: the easterly off the North Sea and the Channel, which arrives with nothing in the way of it and, in spring, arrives cold.

The practical seasonal picture:

• March and April. Firm turf, cheap, and capable of being brutally cold. An easterly in April on this coast will end a round early.
• May and June. The best combination. Long days, turf drying out and running, wind usually manageable, and daylight until late enough to play thirty-six.
• July and August. Peak demand and peak price. Turf at its firmest and fastest, which is the links at its purest, but the tee sheets are full and booking is a year-ahead exercise.
• September and early October. The other sweet spot. Prices soften, the ground is still running, and the light is good.
• November to February. Playable — links drain and rarely close — but short days and unpredictable wind. Worth it for the price and the emptiness if you do not mind the risk.

The general question of timing an English links trip, including how firmness and green speed change through the year, is set out in the best time to play English links.

Inland Kent for a wet or windbound week

The links will almost never be closed for rain — that is the whole point of sand — but they can be unplayable in the sense that a 40mph easterly makes golf pointless for most handicaps. It is worth knowing what else the county holds.

Kent's inland golf is genuinely good and under-visited. The London Golf Club at Ash, near Brands Hatch, has two courses, one of them a Jack Nicklaus design that has hosted professional tournament golf. Chart Hills, near Biddenden in the Weald, was designed with Nick Faldo's involvement and is one of the more ambitious modern English courses. Knole Park at Sevenoaks runs through a medieval deer park and is a completely different experience — parkland golf with fallow deer on the fairways.

North Foreland at Broadstairs is worth separating out. It sits on the clifftop rather than on links land, so the turf is not true links turf, but it is entirely exposed and plays in the same wind. On a day when the low-lying links are windblown and miserable, it offers the same test with a better view and often a shorter walk.

The distinction between links, heathland and parkland turf, and what each does to the way a ball behaves, is explained in the guide to parkland courses in England.

Championship and qualifying golf staged in the county

Kent's competitive record is not just historical. When The Open is played at Sandwich the surrounding clubs are pressed into service, and final qualifying — the last stage at which a player without exemption can earn a place in the field — has been staged on Kent links repeatedly.

That matters to a visitor for two reasons. It means the courses are maintained to a genuinely competitive standard rather than to a resort standard. And it means that in an Open year the area is busy, expensive and difficult to book well beyond the championship week itself.

The county also hosts amateur championships, county events and professional qualifying at various levels through the season. The structure of how a player actually gets into The Open, from regional qualifying through to the exemption categories, is set out in the guide to Open Championship qualifying, and the wider question of which English courses carry championship status is covered in English venues that host The Open.

Why the rota matters to Kent

The Open's venue rota is a small, closed list, and Royal St George's is the only Kent course on it. That single fact drives a great deal of the local golf economy: hotel capacity, green-fee levels at neighbouring clubs, and the frequency with which the area appears in golf travel writing. How the rota is decided, and what a course has to offer to stay on it, is explained in the venue rota guide.

Getting to Sandwich and Deal from London

Rail is the sensible option if your group is not carrying four sets of clubs each, and the high-speed service is what makes it work. Trains from St Pancras International run through Ashford and up around the Kent coast, reaching Sandwich and Deal in roughly two hours. There are also slower conventional services from the Charing Cross and Victoria side through Ashford or Canterbury.

Both Sandwich and Deal have their own stations, and both are walkable towns — Sandwich station is a short walk from the town centre, and the golf clubs are a short taxi ride beyond.

By road, the route is the M2 and the A299 Thanet Way, then down the coast, or the M20 and A256 depending on where you start. Outside peak times it is around two hours from central London. On a Friday in summer, with the Dover-bound traffic, it can be considerably more, and the sections of the M20 near the Channel ports are subject to freight-related delays that have no relationship to golf but will make you late for a tee time.

A day trip is possible and is what many London golfers do: an early train, a round at Prince's or Deal, lunch, and back the same evening. It is a long day for one round, and the argument for staying over is strong as soon as you want to play two.

Clubs are the complication with rail. Most of the Kent clubs will store bags overnight if you are playing on consecutive days, and several offer hire sets, which turns the train option from awkward into straightforward. It is worth asking at the time of booking rather than assuming, because the answer varies by club and by how busy they are. A group of four travelling by train with hired clubs at both ends is a materially cheaper trip than the same group in two cars, and considerably less stressful on a Friday afternoon on the M20.

Green fees, packages and how the money works

This page does not carry prices, which change every season. The structures are worth understanding because they determine what you should be asking for.

Green fees on the Kent links are banded by season, with a clear summer peak and materially lower shoulder and winter rates. Weekend rates, where weekend visitor golf exists at all, are higher than weekday. The two royal clubs sit at the top of the range and Prince's typically below them.

Multi-course packages are the important mechanism. Because the three links are close together and have a shared interest in attracting trips, packages combining rounds at more than one club exist and are usually better value than three separate green fees. These are arranged through the clubs or through the accommodation, and they normally require a group and a lead time.

Booking type	Typical structure	Lead time
Single green fee	Seasonal band, weekday or weekend	Weeks to months
Day ticket	Two rounds, one club, discounted	Weeks
Multi-course package	Rounds at two or three clubs, often with accommodation	Months
Society or group day	Per-head rate, minimum numbers, catering included	Six months to a year
Open Championship year	Everything above, harder and dearer	A year or more

The one genuine warning is about Open years. When the championship returns to Sandwich, the entire area's golf and accommodation market tightens for the whole summer, not just for the week. If your trip falls in such a year, book far earlier than you would otherwise. The general shape of green-fee pricing across the country is set out in green fees in England explained.

What the clubs ask of a visiting golfer

Nobody is going to demand a letter of introduction on the first tee. The paperwork behind a visitor round on this coast is still more real than at a pay-and-play course, and it is far easier to deal with a fortnight ahead than at eight in the morning with a starter waiting.

1. 1Fix the constrained round firstRoyal St George's has the tightest visitor windows, so it sets the dates everything else is built around.
2. 2Have the handicap readyA current index, held before you enquire rather than hunted down on the morning.
3. 3Take the package if there is oneRounds at two or three clubs booked together usually beat three separate green fees.
4. 4Settle bags and hire clubsOvernight storage and hire sets are what turn the train into a sensible option.
5. 5Ask about the loopsAt Prince's the combination of nines is set by the club, and the pro shop knows which one is playing kindly.

The sequence visitor golf on this coast actually follows, not a guarantee of availability at any club.

Handicaps come first. The royal clubs expect a visitor to hold a current handicap index and to be able to show it, and the limits they publish sit in the middle of the amateur range rather than at the generous end. A golfer who plays every week but has never joined a club or returned a qualifying score is in an awkward position, because the requirement is less about standard than about pace. Six hours on a links with a full tee sheet behind you spoils the day for thirty other people. What the index is, and how a score becomes part of it, is set out in the World Handicap System guide; the broader question of how English clubs handle visiting players is covered in visitor access at English golf clubs.

Dress is stricter here than the national average and considerably stricter than at the inland clubs an hour up the road. Collared shirt, tailored trousers or shorts to a stated length, no denim anywhere on the property, and a clubhouse rule that is not necessarily the same as the course rule. Read the club's own page rather than assume. The three courses within five miles of each other do not agree with one another on the detail, which is not the sort of thing to discover in a car park with a tee time in twenty minutes. How much of the folklore around English club dress is still true is picked apart in dress codes and etiquette at English clubs.

Then the walk, which is the thing visitors underestimate most. These are walking courses and they are meant to be walked. Buggy use is normally restricted to players with a medical certificate, and even then a club may keep them off the fairways after rain, because a wheel rut in links turf takes a season to heal. Trolleys are generally fine and occasionally suspended in winter. Caddies can be booked at all three clubs, and on a first visit to Royal St George's a caddie is worth more than anywhere else in England, because several tee shots there aim at nothing you can see and one sentence from someone who knows the line removes the guesswork.

Thirty-six holes in a day over this ground is a serious physical undertaking for a golfer who normally rides. Plan the first afternoon accordingly.

Where to stay: Sandwich, Deal and the coastal towns

Sandwich is the obvious base and the most pleasant. It is a small, well-preserved medieval town with narrow streets, a handful of pubs and inns, and the enormous advantage of being within a few minutes of all three links. It is also small, which means bed capacity is limited and fills fast.

Deal is the alternative and has more of a seaside-town character: a long shingle beach, a Tudor castle built under Henry VIII, and a wider range of places to eat. It has grown into a genuinely good food town over the last decade and is the better choice for a group that wants somewhere to go in the evening.

Prince's operates its own accommodation on site, which removes the transport question entirely and is the simplest option for a group that wants to play, eat and sleep in one place.

Further afield, Canterbury is around half an hour inland and offers far more capacity, more hotels and a great deal more to do for non-golfing partners. Ramsgate and Broadstairs on the Thanet coast are similar distances north. The trade-off is a drive at each end of the day, which matters more than it sounds when the first tee time is at seven.

Littlestone, Romney Marsh and the links further west

The Sandwich cluster gets the attention, but Kent's links do not stop there. Forty minutes west, on the edge of Romney Marsh, Littlestone Golf Club sits behind the shingle at New Romney and is a genuine links of considerable quality.

Littlestone is flatter than the Sandwich courses — Romney Marsh is reclaimed land and the dune movement is limited to a stretch in the middle of the round — but the turf is true links turf and the exposure is total. There is nothing between the course and the Channel. The club has been used for Open final qualifying, which is the clearest available evidence of the standard it is maintained to.

The reason to make the detour is not that Littlestone is better than the courses at Sandwich. It is that it is emptier, cheaper, and completely different in feel: a quiet Edwardian club on a strange, flat, watery piece of England, rather than a championship venue geared to visitor traffic. Groups that add it to a Kent itinerary tend to talk about it more afterwards than they expected to.

Romney Marsh itself is worth the drive. It is one of the odder pieces of English landform — reclaimed wetland below sea level in places, drained by a network of dykes, with isolated medieval churches standing in fields. The golf is incidental to that and better for it.

Building a three-day Kent links trip

The itinerary that works, and which most groups converge on independently, runs like this.

1. 1Day one, afternoonPrince's. The easiest tee time to secure and the gentlest introduction to the wind.
2. 2Day two, morningRoyal St George's, then stop. Thirty-six holes over that ground is more than most visitors enjoy.
3. 3Day three, morningRoyal Cinque Ports, then travel home. It is the course people leave wanting to play again.
4. 4A fourth dayA second combination of nines at Prince's, or inland to Chart Hills or the London Golf Club.
5. 5A fifth dayLittlestone on Romney Marsh, forty minutes west and emptier than anything at Sandwich.

An order built on visitor access and the usual daily wind pattern, not a programme sold by any club.

Day one. Arrive late morning, play Prince's in the afternoon. It is the most accessible course, the easiest to book, and the gentlest introduction to the wind. Playing it first also means you have learned something about the conditions before you spend the big green fee.

Day two. Royal St George's if you have secured a tee time, in the morning while the wind is usually lighter. Take the afternoon off. It is a demanding walk over severe ground and thirty-six holes there is more than most visiting golfers enjoy.

Day three. Royal Cinque Ports at Deal, morning, then travel home. Ending on Deal is deliberate: it is the course most people find they want to play again, and finishing on it sends you away planning the return trip rather than exhausted.

A fourth day, if you have one, is best spent on a second combination of nines at Prince's, or driving inland to Chart Hills or the London Golf Club for a complete change of surface. A fifth is best spent at Littlestone on Romney Marsh, which is forty minutes west and is a genuine links that most visitors to Kent never see.

Two practical points. Book the Royal St George's round first and build everything else around it, because it is the constrained item. And build in a contingency: if a day is lost to weather, the courses that can most easily fit you in at short notice are Prince's and the inland clubs, not the royals. More English golf and sport itineraries are collected on the England hub, and the blog carries shorter pieces on individual courses and trips.