Sunningdale Old And New Courses: A Visitor's Full Guide

Stand on the tenth tee of the Old Course on a clear morning and the ground falls away in front of you towards a fairway framed by pines, with heather running down both sides and the green sitting in a hollow a long way below. It is probably the most photographed view in English inland golf, and it is doing something more useful than looking pretty: it is telling you, without a word, that the next shot is a decision rather than an execution.

Sunningdale is two full eighteen-hole courses on one sandy heath, built twenty-two years apart by two of the most important figures in golf architecture, and run by a club that has never had much interest in explaining itself. Any honest sunningdale golf club guide has to cover the golf and the access in roughly equal measure, because getting on is the part most people find hardest.

Heath, sand and how one club came to own two full courses

The club was founded in 1900 on leased land — the ground came from St John's College, Cambridge, which had held the estate for centuries and had no obvious use for a stretch of scrub heath west of London. What made that scrub valuable was the soil under it. This corner of Berkshire sits on the sands and gravels that run in a band across the counties west and south-west of the capital, and sandy ground drains, holds heather, grows fine fescue and bent grasses, and stays firm through an English winter.

Willie Park Jnr, twice an Open champion and by then working as an architect, laid out the first eighteen holes. The course opened in 1901. It was, at the time, a considerable gamble: inland golf in England was played almost entirely on heavy clay parkland, and the idea that a course this far from the sea could give a firm, running game was not yet proven.

Demand did the rest. Within twenty years the club had more members than one course could carry, and it bought and cleared adjoining heath for a second. Harry Colt designed it, and it opened in 1923 as the New. The result is one of a small number of English clubs where two courses of championship standard sit side by side and share a clubhouse, a practice ground and a single halfway hut. The wider family they belong to is described in the guide to England's heathland courses, and the geological band they sit on is the subject of the Surrey heath belt.

The two architects, and what each of them brought to the heath

Two names sit on this property and they belonged to very different men.

Willie Park Jnr came out of Musselburgh, from the most successful golfing family in Scotland — his father won the first Open Championship in 1860, and Park Jnr himself won it twice, in 1887 and 1889. He was a professional in the full nineteenth-century sense: he played, he made clubs, he sold them, and he built courses for anyone who would pay. He also wrote. The Game of Golf, published in 1896, is generally described as the first book on golf written by a professional player, and its author was known above all as a putter, which shows in his work. Park's greens are not decorative. They are the part of the hole he expected the argument to happen on, and the Old Course still reflects that priority a century and a quarter later. His other British courses include Huntercombe in Oxfordshire, which he built and for a time owned outright, and he spent the last part of his career working in North America.

Harry Colt was nothing like him. He read law at Cambridge, played for the university, qualified as a solicitor and came into golf architecture sideways, through club administration — he was involved in the founding of Rye and served as its honorary secretary before Sunningdale appointed him in 1901. The distinction matters more than it sounds. Colt was the first significant course architect who had never been a playing professional, and he approached the job as a designer rather than as a craftsman extending his own game. He drew plans. He thought about how a hole would look from the tee and how it would be maintained in twenty years' time, which is why his tree planting at Sunningdale was a design decision rather than landscaping.

The list of what Colt went on to build is close to a survey of the best inland golf in England: Swinley Forest a few miles away, St George's Hill above Weybridge, Wentworth, and remodelling work at courses including Muirfield. He later practised in partnership with Charles Alison and, for a period, Alister MacKenzie, and he was consulted on Pine Valley in New Jersey. The clubs he shaped across this corner of England are set out in the guide to the Surrey heath belt.

What Sunningdale got from the pairing is unusual. Park routed the ground while the received wisdom still said inland golf could not be firm, and Colt then had twenty years living beside the result to correct it. Very few courses anywhere have been designed by one first-rate architect and then continuously edited by another one who had to play it, walk it and answer for it every day.

The Old Course: Park, Colt and a century of refinement

Park's routing is still recognisable, but very little of the detail is his. The single most consequential appointment the club ever made was Harry Colt as its first secretary in 1901 — a man who would go on to design or remodel a very large proportion of the best inland courses in Britain, and who spent more than two decades living beside the Old Course and adjusting it.

Colt planted. He put in the pines and the birch that now frame most of the holes, on ground that in 1901 was open heath with barely a tree on it. He rebuilt bunkers, moved greens, changed angles. The Old Course as it is played today is the product of that long, incremental process rather than of a single design event, and it is one of the reasons the course feels settled in a way that newly built courses rarely do.

The holes people talk about

The fifth is the hole that first announces the club's quality: a long par four played over water and rising ground to a green set high, where a shot struck slightly weakly finishes a very long way below the hole. The sixth is a hard par four with heather down one side and no comfortable line. The tenth, downhill from the elevated tee, is the postcard hole and one of the few great views in English golf that also asks a proper question, since the fairway narrows exactly where a good drive would like to finish.

The eighteenth climbs back towards the clubhouse and finishes beside the enormous oak that stands behind the green, a tree old enough to have been there before the club was. Playing an approach with that oak in the background is one of the small experiences English golf does better than anywhere else.

What links these holes is that almost none of them is defended primarily by length. The Old Course is not long by modern professional standards and it has never tried to be. It is defended by angle, by the position of the sand relative to the line a player wants to take, and by green surrounds that reject an approach played from the wrong side of the fairway. A player who drives it a long way but pays no attention to which half of the fairway they are in will score worse here than a shorter player who thinks about it, and that is a rarer property in golf architecture than it ought to be.

Why the greens matter more than the bunkers

The putting surfaces on the Old sit on sand and have been maintained on fine grasses for well over a century, which produces a firmness and a trueness that most inland English golfers encounter only rarely. Two consequences follow. The first is that approach shots have to be flighted with the bounce in mind, because a ball landing on a firm sand-based green will release much further than the same shot on a clay-based parkland surface. The second is that the borrows are subtle rather than severe, and a green that looks flat from twenty feet is very often not. Visitors routinely three-putt their first three greens and then start reading everything as a foot more break than they see. That is usually the correct adjustment.

The New Course and the argument that it is the sterner test

The New opened in 1923 with a different brief. Colt had a larger, more open piece of ground and a membership that already had a subtle, strategic course to play. What he built is more exposed, less framed by trees, and carries a good deal more heather in play.

The case that the New is the harder examination rests on three things. The tee shots are less obviously defined, because there are fewer pines to aim between, and an undefined tee shot is more difficult to commit to than a framed one. The heather sits closer to the line on more holes, and heather is a genuinely brutal hazard — a ball sitting down in it may be unplayable in any meaningful sense, and the strong recommendation of anyone who plays there often is to wedge it out sideways rather than attempt a hero shot. And the wind reaches the New in a way it does not always reach the Old.

The case for the Old is that it is more interesting, that its greens ask more of a player, and that the walk itself is better. Members disagree in both directions and the disagreement is a century old. A visitor who has the chance to play both in a day should take it, and should expect to score better on the Old.

Playing the New for the first time

The practical advice from people who play the New regularly is unglamorous. Take one more club than the yardage suggests when the wind is against, because the exposure is real and the ball flight on firm ground is lower than you think. Aim at the middle of greens, since the pin positions on the New can be brutal and the recovery from a missed green into heather is far worse than a thirty-foot putt. And treat every ball hit into heather as a lost stroke rather than a lost hole. The single most common way a good player wrecks a card here is by trying to advance a ball from a heather lie towards a green, catching the stems, moving it fifteen yards into more heather, and doing it again.

There is one further difference that visitors rarely anticipate. Because the New has less tree cover, distance judgement is harder. Trees provide unconscious scale references, and on an open heath without them the eye consistently underestimates how far away a green is. A rangefinder is more useful on the New than on the Old for exactly this reason.

	Old Course	New Course
Opened	1901	1923
Original architect	Willie Park Jnr	Harry Colt
Later shaping	Colt, over two decades	Largely as designed, with restoration work
Tree cover	Heavy — pines and birch frame most holes	Lighter and more open
Heather in play	Significant	More significant
Exposure to wind	Partly sheltered	Noticeably more exposed
Reputation	The more charming round	The sterner scoring test

Heather, pine and birch as the working hazards

Bunkers at Sunningdale are numerous and well placed, but they are not the hazard that decides most cards. Heather is.

Calluna vulgaris, the common heather that covers these heaths, has a dense woody root structure and a springy top growth. A ball that lands on top of a heather clump may sit up invitingly and be perfectly playable. A ball that trickles into the base of one is gone in every sense that matters: the club decelerates through the stems, the face twists, and the ball moves two feet. The gap between the best and worst lie in the same patch of heather is larger than in any other hazard in golf, and that randomness is the point. It makes the heather a genuine deterrent rather than a calculable cost.

1. 1Find it, then look hard at the lieA ball perched on top of a clump is playable. A ball sitting down among the stems is not.
2. 2Play it as it lies, sidewaysA wedge back to short grass costs one shot. Aiming at the green from a bad lie usually costs three.
3. 3Or declare it unplayableOne penalty stroke, then stroke and distance, back-on-the-line relief, or two club-lengths no nearer the hole.
4. 4Check what the relief area actually containsTwo club-lengths of more heather is not relief, which is why the back-on-the-line option is often the better one.

The options the Rules of Golf allow in general rough, not a local rule peculiar to this club.

There is a further wrinkle that catches visitors under the Rules of Golf. Heather is not a penalty area. It is general rough, which means there is no drop, no lateral relief and no line-of-sight option. The only escapes are to play it as it lies or to declare the ball unplayable and take a penalty stroke, and the unplayable relief options themselves are constrained when everything within two club-lengths is more heather. Knowing that in advance saves an argument on the fourth hole.

The pines and silver birch add a second problem. Trees on a heathland course are not there to be recovered from with a low draw, because the trunks are close together and the ground beneath them is often heather or bare needles. They are also, from a greenkeeping perspective, a threat to the thing that makes the course good: birch self-seeds aggressively and shades out heather, and heath that is left alone for thirty years becomes woodland. Clubs across this part of England now run continuous clearance programmes to hold the balance, which is why visitors sometimes arrive to find a stretch of holes looking newly bare.

The halfway hut and the customs visitors ask about

Between the two courses, near the turn, stands a small wooden hut. It is the most famous refreshment stop in English golf and it exists because two eighteen-hole courses converge at that point and nobody wanted to walk back to the clubhouse.

The sausage sandwich is the item people talk about. There are other things on offer, and the queue moves briskly, and the correct behaviour is to eat standing up, keep moving and not lose your place on the tee sheet. It is a small ritual and it is completely genuine — members organise their morning around it.

Why it works is worth a sentence, because plenty of clubs have built halfway houses since and very few of them have this effect. The hut is small, so nobody sits down. It stands where four groups from two different courses converge, so you meet people you did not come with. And it interrupts the round at a point where an English golfer is usually cold, which is a large part of why a hot sandwich eaten outdoors in October acquires a significance that the same sandwich indoors would not. The lesson other clubs took from it was the catering. The lesson they missed was the architecture of the queue.

Other customs are worth knowing before you arrive. Caddies are a normal part of a day here rather than an indulgence, and a caddie who knows the heather lines and the green complexes will save a visitor more shots than a rangefinder. Mobile phone use is restricted to defined areas. Dress standards apply on the course and, separately and more strictly, inside the clubhouse, where different rooms and different times of day carry different expectations. The general shape of these conventions across English clubs is set out in the guide to golf etiquette and dress codes in England, and it is worth reading if you have not played a club of this kind before.

Great rounds and championships associated with the club

The single most celebrated round in the club's history was not played in a championship at all. In 1926, qualifying for The Open, Bobby Jones went round the Old Course in 66 — out in 33, back in 33, with 33 shots and 33 putts. The symmetry of the numbers is part of the legend, but the reason the round is still discussed is that contemporaries who watched it described a golfer who did not miss a shot for four hours. Jones went on to win The Open that year. The qualifying structure that produced the round has changed considerably since, and the modern route in is explained in Open Championship qualifying.

• 66Score
• 33Out
• 33Back
• 33Putts

The figures from that single round on the Old Course. Not a claim about the course record before or since.

Sunningdale has hosted the Walker Cup, the amateur match between Great Britain and Ireland and the United States, which GB and I won when it was played on the Old Course in 1987. That was only the third GB&I win in a match first played in 1922, and it came two years before the side finally won on American soil, so the Sunningdale week sits at the hinge of the fixture's modern history rather than in its long American stretch. How the ten players are picked, and why the away leg was the harder half of the cycle for so long, is covered in the Walker Cup explained. It has staged the Women's British Open. It hosted the European Open on the men's professional tour across a number of years, and it has a long association with senior and amateur championship golf.

The club is also home to the Sunningdale Foursomes, an invitation event for pairs playing foursomes off handicap that has run since the 1930s and that puts amateurs, professionals, men and women in the same draw. It is one of the very few competitions in Britain where a leading professional can be knocked out by a pair of club golfers, and it survives because the format makes that outcome genuinely possible.

The reason a club with two eighteen-hole courses on this quality of ground has never staged The Open is straightforward and has nothing to do with the golf. The Open is played on links, on genuine seaside turf, and that has been a fixed condition of the Championship throughout its history. Sunningdale, for all the firmness of its sand, is thirty miles from the sea. The distinction and the reasoning behind it are set out in the guide to why The Open is played on links courses. What Sunningdale has instead is a century of amateur and professional championship golf at a level that very few inland clubs anywhere can match.

How the two courses change through the seasons

Sand under the turf is the most valuable thing a British golf club can own, because it decides how many days a year the course is worth playing.

Through late spring and summer the ground here runs firm and the ball chases, which brings the heather and the bunkering into play off the tee for players who would carry them in softer conditions. Greens are quick. Approach shots have to be landed short and allowed to release, and a high, soft wedge that lands on the green will often bounce over the back.

In August the heather flowers and the whole property turns purple, which is the best fortnight of the year to see the place, though it makes finding a ball no easier. Autumn brings the leaf on the birch and, usually, the most reliably pleasant golf of the year. Early spring is the least flattering season: the heather is cut back and brown, the trees are bare, and the course looks thinner than it is, though it plays perfectly well.

The variation is greater than it sounds. The same hole can require a mid-iron approach in February and a wedge in August, not because the yardage changes but because the amount of run on the drive does. Anyone who plays here twice a year effectively plays two courses, and the members' habit of describing conditions in terms of how far the ball is going rather than how the greens are rolling reflects that.

Winter is where the heath belt separates itself from the rest of inland England. Where clay courses close, put out temporary greens or become unwalkable, sandy heath drains in hours. Sunningdale is playable in January in a way that a course thirty miles east on London Clay simply is not. That does not mean the golf is the same: the ball plugs where it lands, run-out disappears, the course plays much longer, and preferred lies are usually in operation. What the winter rules actually permit under the Rules of Golf, and what a local committee can and cannot introduce, is covered in the guide to winter golf rules in England.

Getting on: introductions, days and the visitor route

This is the section most people come for, and the honest answer is that Sunningdale is accessible but not easy.

The club takes visitors on weekdays. Weekends are for members and their guests. Access is arranged in advance through the club rather than through a booking platform, and there is no walk-up play at any time of year. Enquiries for prime summer dates need to be made a long way ahead — months rather than weeks — and the club is entitled to decline.

Two things are normally asked for. The first is evidence of a current handicap, maintained under the World Handicap System, which most visiting golfers can produce from their home club's app or portal. The second is an introduction from your home club, typically a letter or an email from the secretary confirming that you are a member in good standing. Neither is a formality invented to make life difficult; both exist to keep two crowded courses moving at a reasonable pace. The general practice across the better English clubs, including what to do if you are not a member anywhere, is set out in the guide to visitor access at English clubs.

1. 1Enquire with the club, months aheadWeekdays only, direct to the club, and the prime summer mornings go first.
2. 2Offer a flexible date and a small groupA late-April two-ball fits gaps that a July four-ball never will.
3. 3Produce a current handicapMaintained under the World Handicap System and printable from your home club's portal.
4. 4Supply an introductionNormally an email from your home club's secretary confirming you are a member in good standing.
5. 5Settle the shape of the dayOne round or a day ticket, which course, caddie, lunch, all agreed before you travel.

The sequence a weekday enquiry follows. It describes the process, not the odds of being offered a date.

The most reliable route in remains the oldest one: play as the guest of a member. Failing that, some organised golf tour operators hold arrangements with clubs of this type, and county and society fixtures occasionally bring visiting groups onto the tee sheet.

A few practical points shorten the odds. Ask for a shoulder-season date rather than a July morning; the ground in late April or late September is often better anyway. Be flexible about which course you are offered, because a New Course tee time is easier to obtain than an Old Course one and is not a consolation prize. Enquire as a two-ball or a three-ball rather than a four-ball, since smaller groups slot into gaps that larger ones cannot. And ask about a two-course day at the point of the first enquiry rather than afterwards, because it changes how the club allocates you on the sheet.

It is also worth being realistic about what a refusal means. A club of this size turns down a great many requests simply because the tee sheet is full, and a polite enquiry for a different month will often succeed where the first one did not. Persistence is more effective here than any clever approach.

Green fees, day tickets and the two-course day

Rates change annually and are reviewed by the club, so the structure is more useful to understand than any figure.

Expect a single-round green fee on either course, priced by season, with a clear premium on the Old. Expect a day ticket that covers both courses in one visit, priced at less than the sum of two singles, which is the option most visitors who have travelled a distance should take. Expect winter rates that are markedly lower and that reflect a shorter day, softer ground and preferred lies. Some clubs of this type also operate a reduced rate for a round played late in the day in summer.

Caddies are booked separately and paid separately, normally in cash on the day, with a fee set by the caddie master and a gratuity at your discretion. Buggies are usually restricted or unavailable on heathland of this type, partly because of the terrain and partly because of the damage to heather, so plan to walk or to take a trolley. Catering is arranged in advance for groups. How English clubs structure all of this — the difference between a green fee, a day ticket and a guest rate, and what each includes — is covered in the guide to green fees in England.

Caddies, the practice ground and what to expect at the club

The practice facilities are good and worth arriving early for, not to warm up so much as to calibrate. The most useful twenty minutes a visitor can spend here are on the putting green and the short-game area, because Sunningdale's greens run faster and break more subtly than most players expect, and the recovery shots from heathland lies are unlike anything an inland English club golfer plays week to week.

A caddie is the single best investment on a first visit. The value is not in yardages, which you can get from a device, but in lines: which side of a fairway leaves the shot, where the heather is genuinely unplayable, which back-left pin should simply be ignored. Book one when you book the round; they are not always available at short notice.

The clubhouse is comfortable rather than grand and the lunch is part of the day rather than an afterthought. Allow time either side of the golf. A day at Sunningdale that consists of arriving twenty minutes before the tee time and leaving straight afterwards misses most of the point.

On equipment, two small things are worth thinking about. Spikes and soft spikes are fine, but heathland turf in summer is hard enough that a worn sole gives noticeably less grip on the sloping lies around the greens. And a golf ball that spins heavily is less use here than one that flights lower into wind, because most of the shots that matter are played into firm surfaces where spin is not the limiting factor. Neither point will change your score by much. Both are the kind of adjustment that regulars make without thinking about it and that visitors never hear mentioned.

Building a Berkshire and Surrey trip around a Sunningdale day

Sunningdale sits at the centre of the densest concentration of good inland golf in Britain, and using it as a single-day destination wastes the geography.

Within a short drive are Wentworth, with its three courses and its long association with professional golf, described in the guide to the Wentworth West Course; The Berkshire, whose Red and Blue courses sit in pine woodland a few miles away; Swinley Forest, one of Colt's most admired and most private designs; and Walton Heath, a little further east and covered in our guide to Walton Heath. South towards Woking there is a further cluster of heathland clubs within a few miles of each other.

Travel is easy by the standards of English golf. Sunningdale station is a short walk from the club, on the line out of London Waterloo, and the surrounding clubs are mostly within twenty or thirty minutes by road. Ascot, Windsor and Guildford all offer somewhere to stay, and Windsor gives a non-golfing partner something to do with a day. More of the English game is signposted from the England hub and from our golf coverage.

The best version of the trip is three days and four rounds, with the two-course day at Sunningdale in the middle of it, played in early September when the ground is still firm and the tee sheets have loosened.