Wentworth West Course Guide: The Burma Road Explained

Two par fives to finish. That is the design decision that made Wentworth famous, and it is a strange one. Almost no championship course in Britain ends with back-to-back three-shot holes, because conventional wisdom says a tournament should close on something that punishes rather than rewards. Wentworth closes on two holes where a player three behind can still win and a player three ahead can still lose, and the DP World Tour has built its flagship week around exactly that arithmetic.

The rest of the West Course is more orthodox than the finish suggests: a Harry Colt design cut through Surrey pine and heather in the 1920s, laid over gently rolling ground on the edge of the sand belt, and rebuilt in stages ever since. The interesting question is how much of Colt is left, and the answer is more than the arguments of the last twenty years would lead you to expect.

The Wentworth estate and how the club is put together

Wentworth is not simply a golf club. It is a private estate at Virginia Water in Surrey, on the Berkshire border, comprising several hundred acres of residential property wrapped around three eighteen-hole golf courses, a tennis and health club, and a clubhouse built around a nineteenth-century mansion.

That structure matters because it explains the access rules. The golf is one amenity of a gated residential estate, and the club's obligations run first to its members and residents rather than to visiting golfers. It is the opposite of the arrangement at a links club that survives on green-fee income.

The three courses are the West, the East and the Edinburgh. The West is the tournament course and the one people mean when they say Wentworth. The East is older and shorter. The Edinburgh was added at the end of the 1980s to take pressure off the other two as membership grew. There is also a short executive course used for family golf and beginners.

• 3Full-length courses
• 1926West Course opened
• 1953Ryder Cup staged
• 2Par fives to finish

Figures stated elsewhere on this page. Yardages are excluded deliberately, because they have changed with every redesign.

Ownership has changed hands more than once and the club passed to new owners in the 2010s, a transition accompanied by a substantial restructuring of membership terms that was widely reported and contested at the time by existing members. The details of that dispute are a matter for the parties involved; what is relevant here is that Wentworth's membership model has not been static, and that any description of it should be read as a description of a structure rather than a fixed set of terms.

Harry Colt's West Course and what he was working with

Harry Colt laid out the West Course in the mid-1920s and it opened in 1926. Colt was, by then, the most influential architect in Britain — he had shaped Sunningdale's New Course, worked at Swinley Forest and St George's Hill, and effectively invented the English heathland style as a coherent thing.

The ground he was given at Wentworth is different from the ground at Sunningdale. It rolls more, it carries more clay in places, and it was more heavily wooded. Colt's response was to route the holes through corridors of pine and birch rather than across open heath, which produces a course with a very different feel: enclosed, framed, and far less exposed to wind than the courses further east on the North Downs. If you want the contrast in a single trip, the open ground at Walton Heath is thirty minutes away and plays nothing like this.

Colt's characteristic devices are all present. Doglegs are set at the distance a well-struck drive reaches, so that the corner is a live decision rather than a formality. Greens are pitched to accept a shot from one side of the fairway and reject it from the other. Bunkers sit tight to green edges rather than being pushed out into decorative positions.

What the corridors do to strategy

Tree-lined golf on rolling ground creates a specific problem: you often cannot see where the ball has finished, and you frequently cannot see the flag from where you have finished. Wentworth rewards a player who plots a route rather than one who simply hits it a long way, because the punishment for a marginal miss is not thick rough but a tree, and a tree is an absolute obstacle rather than a graduated one.

There is a second consequence that shows up in scoring. On an open course a poor drive costs you a fraction of a shot on average — sometimes nothing, occasionally two. On a corridor course it costs close to a full shot every time, because the recovery options collapse to one. That makes the West a course where a steady, short-hitting player can beat a long, wild one by a wide margin, which is not true at every championship venue and is one reason the tournament produces the winners it does.

This is also why the West divides opinion among architecture writers. Some regard the tree corridors as an unnecessary narrowing of what was originally a more open heathland design. Others regard them as the course's identity. The club has removed trees in some phases of work and left them in others, and there is no settled position.

What survives of Colt

The question the opening raised — how much of Colt is left — has a specific answer, and it is not the one the redesign arguments imply.

The routing is his. The order of the holes, the direction each one runs, the points at which the golf crosses the estate roads, the way the course returns to the clubhouse: all of that is 1926 and none of it has been altered. Routing is the part of a design that cannot be changed without rebuilding from scratch, and it is also the part that determines most of what a golfer experiences on the day.

What has changed is everything at the two ends of a hole. Tees have moved back, sometimes a long way and occasionally sideways, which alters the angle into a dogleg as much as the length of it. Greens have been rebuilt, reshaped and in a few cases resited. Bunkers have been moved, filled in and added across several phases of work.

The skeleton is Colt and a good deal of the surface is not. Whether that leaves a Colt course is a question of definition rather than of fact, and the people who argue about it are mostly arguing about the definition.

Where the Burma Road name came from

The nickname attached itself to the West Course around the time of the Second World War and there are two accounts of it.

The first is that it commemorates labour. The estate was requisitioned during the war, and the work of clearing, repairing and restoring the ground afterwards was long, physical and unglamorous. The Burma Road — the supply route built through mountainous terrain in Asia — became a byword in mid-century Britain for exactly that kind of grinding construction work, and the name transferred.

The second is simpler: the course was long, punishing and relentless, and golfers gave it the name for the same reason they give hard holes names.

The honest position is that both accounts are repeated by the club and by golf historians and neither is settled by a contemporary document that anyone has produced. It is a nickname, and nicknames rarely leave paperwork. What is not in doubt is that the label stuck and has outlived several redesigns of the course it describes.

The redesigns and why they kept happening

Very few great courses have been reworked as publicly as the West. The reason is the tournament. A course hosting a flagship professional event every year is subject to constant pressure from equipment gains, from broadcast requirements, and from the tour's own view of what a modern championship test should be.

Phase	Broad purpose	Typical work
Post-war restoration	Repairing wartime damage	Clearing, re-turfing, rebuilding tees
Mid-century lengthening	Keeping pace with the professional game	New back tees, bunker repositioning
The 2000s redesign	Toughening the course for tour play	Reshaped greens, new water, reworked finish
The 2010s revision	Softening what had gone too far	Bunker changes, green contour adjustment
Greens reconstruction	Agronomy and drainage	Full rebuild of putting surfaces

The 2000s programme, carried out with Ernie Els involved in the design, was the most contested. It brought water into play on the closing holes, reshaped greens to steeper contours, and made the course markedly harder. The reaction from tour players and members was mixed enough that a subsequent phase of work walked several of the changes back.

That sequence — push, complaint, partial reversal — is not unique to Wentworth, but it happened here in front of a television audience. The result is a course that is neither purely Colt nor purely modern, and that has to be assessed as what it is rather than as a restoration project that failed.

The underlying tension

Every course that hosts a professional event annually faces the same conflict, and Wentworth faces it in a sharper form than most because the two constituencies are physically the same course on consecutive weeks.

The tour wants a test that identifies the best player over four rounds and that produces the shot values television can show. That pushes towards length, towards firm and fast surfaces, and towards greens with enough contour that a well-struck approach is distinguishable from an adequate one.

The membership wants a course that is enjoyable to play three times a week at a handicap, that does not take five hours, and that does not turn a decent round into a card-wrecker with one steep pin. Those objectives are not opposed in principle. In practice, the features that make an approach shot interesting for a professional at 160 yards make it punishing for a member at 210.

The mechanisms that resolve this are the ones every championship club uses: multiple tee positions, pin sheets that reserve the hardest locations for tournament week, and green speeds that differ substantially between the members' season and the championship. Where the 2000s work at Wentworth overreached, in the view of many who play there, was that it changed permanent contours rather than temporary setup — and permanent contours affect the member on every round of the year.

How to read the criticism

It is worth being careful about the volume of complaint attached to Wentworth's redesigns, because a course under this much scrutiny attracts commentary that a quieter club never would. Some of the criticism was substantive and led to changes. Some of it was the ordinary conservatism that greets any alteration to a famous course. Sorting one from the other requires playing it, and most people writing about it have not.

The par-five finish and the drama it manufactures

The 17th and 18th are both par fives, and together they are the most recognisable closing pair in European golf.

The 17th turns sharply left around trees, which sets the whole question of the hole: how much of the corner do you take on, and what does that leave you for a second? Cut too much and the trees are in the way. Play safe and the green is out of range. It is a genuine risk-and-reward hole in the technical sense, meaning the risk and the reward are proportionate rather than one being obviously correct.

The 18th climbs to a green in front of the clubhouse, with the second shot the decisive one. In tournament conditions the hole is reachable for a player who has driven well, and the crowd knows it, which produces the particular noise Wentworth generates on a Sunday afternoon.

What makes the pair work as a finish is that they interact. A player one behind playing 17 knows there is another chance at 18, which changes what they attempt at 17. A player one ahead knows their opponent has two chances left, which changes how conservatively they can play. Two consecutive par fives create a decision tree that a par four and a par three do not, and it is why the finish survived every redesign even when other holes did not.

Why this finish is unusual

The convention in championship architecture is to close on a long par four — something that yields a par to a good shot and a bogey to a poor one, so the leader's advantage is protected. Wentworth does the opposite. It hands the trailing player a lever. Broadcasters like this a great deal, and it is one of the reasons the DP World Tour has kept its flagship event here rather than rotating it around the country, a decision explained further in the guide to DP World Tour events in England.

BMW PGA Championship week and what changes on the course

The BMW PGA Championship is the DP World Tour's flagship event and has been played on the West since the mid-1980s. Before that Wentworth's fame rested on the World Match Play Championship, which ran there for decades and produced some of the best-remembered matches in the European game.

Tournament setup differs from members' golf in several specific ways rather than in general severity:

• Tees. The championship markers add substantial length, and on several holes shift the angle as well as the distance.
• Rough. Grown in for months beforehand and graduated — a light cut immediately off the fairway, heavier beyond.
• Green speed. Rolled and cut down for the week, then allowed to recover afterwards.
• Pin positions. Placed to use the green contours the members mostly avoid.
• Hole locations on the closing holes. Set to make the second shots to 17 and 18 a real decision rather than an automatic one.

1. 1Months aheadRough is grown in and graduated, a light cut off the fairway and heavier beyond it.
2. 2The weeks beforeChampionship tees open up, adding length and on several holes changing the angle as well.
3. 3Championship weekGreens are cut down and rolled to tournament speed.
4. 4Each morningPin sheets put flags on contours the membership mostly avoids, with 17 and 18 set to force a decision.
5. 5AfterwardsSpeeds come back down, the rough is cut, and the course is handed back to recover.

The order the preparation runs in. Exact timings belong to the club and vary year to year.

The full week — the schedule, the pro-am, the spectator practicalities and the ticketing — is covered separately in the BMW PGA Championship guide. Wentworth's tournament history is longer than that one event, though: the club hosted the Ryder Cup in 1953, and the match played there in 1926 between British and American professionals is generally treated as the immediate forerunner of the competition proper.

The World Match Play years and what they left behind

Before the BMW PGA, Wentworth's reputation rested on a different kind of week. The World Match Play Championship began at the club in 1964 and stayed for decades, built on a format nobody else was using: a small invited field, and matches played over thirty-six holes rather than eighteen.

Thirty-six-hole match play is close to a different sport. A player can be five down at lunch and win, which happened often enough that crowds stayed for the afternoon of a match that looked finished. It also brought the two closing par fives into play twice in a day, and produced recoveries that entered the game's folklore in a way a stroke-play Sunday rarely does.

The field was tiny — eight players in the early years, enlarged later — and invitational rather than earned. That was the format's weakness, and a fair criticism: a championship which picks its own competitors is hard to defend on merit. What the invitation bought was quality. Every match was between two players worth watching, there was no cut, and nothing on the schedule was filler.

Gary Player and Severiano Ballesteros each won it five times. Ernie Els won it seven, one of the more remarkable records in European golf, and part of why his later involvement in reshaping the West carried the weight it did with the club.

The event eventually left Wentworth and changed format more than once afterwards, and it never recovered the standing it held in the 1970s and 1980s. What it left at the club was an audience that understood match play, a course set up to reward attacking golf on the closing stretch, and a pair of finishing holes whose reputation was made under a format the tournament no longer uses.

The East and Edinburgh courses compared

The East opened before the West and is the older course on the estate. It is shorter, tighter and more intimate, and a significant number of members prefer it. It is not a resort second course in the modern sense — it is a genuine Colt-era design with its own character, and its short holes in particular are highly regarded.

The Edinburgh was built at the end of the 1980s, on the far side of the estate, to a design associated with John Jacobs. It was created to add capacity, and it plays as a more modern course: more open, more visible, with hazards you can see from the tee. It is the least celebrated of the three and the easiest to get on.

Course	Character	Best for
West	Long, tree-lined, championship setup	The full Wentworth experience
East	Shorter, subtler, older	Members who play often and value variety
Edinburgh	Modern, more open	Capacity, societies, corporate days

For a visitor with a single opportunity the West is the point of the exercise. For anyone with a longer relationship with the club, the East is the course that tends to grow on people.

The three-course structure also solves a problem that single-course championship clubs cannot. When the West is being prepared for the tournament, or recovering afterwards, or under reconstruction work, members still have somewhere to play. That is the practical reason estates of this kind built additional courses, and it is why the Edinburgh exists at all — not as an architectural statement but as capacity.

Greens reconstruction, drainage and modern conditioning

The most significant recent work at Wentworth was not architectural but agronomic. The putting surfaces on the West were reconstructed in full, with new drainage and new rootzone, and the greens converted towards bentgrass.

The reasoning is standard modern practice and worth understanding because it applies across English golf. Older greens frequently sit on native soil with poor drainage and a grass sward dominated by annual meadow grass. That grass is shallow-rooted, seeds prolifically, needs a great deal of water and fertiliser, and is vulnerable to disease and to winter damage. Rebuilding to a free-draining sand rootzone with drainage beneath, and establishing bent or fescue, produces surfaces that drain faster, hold their speed later into the year, need fewer inputs and recover better.

Drainage beneath the surface is only half the job. Surface water has to be got away from the green complex as well, which means attention to the surrounds, to the collection points where water naturally gathers, and to the paths and access routes that carry machinery on and off. A green that drains perfectly but sits at the bottom of a bowl collecting run-off from the surrounding banks has not been fixed.

Wentworth's underlying ground is heavier than the pure sand belt further west, which made this work more necessary here than at some neighbouring clubs. The trade-off is that a full reconstruction takes the greens out of play for a season and takes several years to mature. It also, over time, changes how the course plays: firmer surfaces reject a poorly struck approach in a way soft ones do not.

The R&A's course-management work sets out why English clubs are moving in this direction, and the broader picture of how parkland and near-parkland courses in England are conditioned is covered in the guide to parkland golf courses in England.

What the work costs a club in things other than money

A full greens reconstruction is the most disruptive project a club can take on, and the cost that matters is not the one on the invoice.

The greens come out of play. Depending on when the work starts that means temporary surfaces for the best part of a year, and temporary greens change every hole — approaches that were the point of the design become irrelevant, and the course a member joined is not the course they are playing. Subscriptions still fall due. Some members leave.

Then there is maturation. Young grass on a new rootzone is soft and inconsistent for a period after it opens, and it takes several growing seasons to behave as intended. Rebuilding in phases spreads the disruption and extends it.

Wentworth could absorb this because it has three courses and a membership that expected the work. A single-course club with a stretched budget faces identical agronomy and a much harder decision, which is why so many put it off.

How the West plays for a club golfer off the members' tees

Watching the tournament gives a misleading impression. From the members' markers the West is long but not brutal, and the defining characteristic is accuracy off the tee rather than length.

The practical experience for a mid-handicap player is roughly this. The tree corridors mean a wayward drive costs a stroke almost every time — there is no bail-out, and the recovery is a punch-out rather than a hopeful long iron. The greens, post-reconstruction, are firm enough that approaches need to land short and release rather than stop on the pitch mark. And the closing holes, played as three-shot par fives rather than reachable ones, are perfectly manageable and rather enjoyable.

The score most club golfers post is worse than the same player's score on a course of equivalent rating, and the reason is the second shot from the trees. Anyone playing here for the first time should treat the driver as optional and the fairway as the entire objective.

Elevation change is the other thing television flattens. The ground moves more than the broadcast suggests, several approaches are played uphill, and the walk is longer than the yardage implies. A caddie is worth taking if one is available.

A sensible strategy for one round

If you get a single round here, the approach that produces the best result is unglamorous. Play to the middle of every green regardless of where the flag is, because the contours punish a miss on the short side far more than they reward a close approach. Take one more club than the yardage suggests on uphill shots, of which there are several. Treat the 17th as a three-shot hole unless the drive has finished perfectly, and treat the 18th the same way. And on any hole where the tee shot is framed tightly by trees, hit whatever club you can actually keep in the corridor, even if it leaves a long second.

The players who enjoy Wentworth least are the ones who arrive determined to play it the way they saw it played on television. The professionals are hitting from tees you are not using, to pins you will not see, off a ball flight most club golfers do not have. Playing your own game on a course built for someone else's is the whole skill of a one-off round at a championship venue.

Access for non-members and the routes that exist

The honest answer to whether you can play Wentworth is: probably not by asking. The West Course is not sold as green-fee golf in the way a links club sells it, and there is no public tee sheet to book.

The routes that do exist, roughly in order of likelihood:

1. A member's guest. By far the most common way anyone who is not a member plays the course. Members may bring guests, subject to the club's rules and a guest fee.
2. A corporate or charity day. The club hosts organised days, and a place on one is bought or donated rather than booked.
3. A hotel or estate package. Where accommodation on or adjacent to the estate is bundled with golf, that arrangement can carry an entitlement. Availability varies and should be checked directly.
4. Reciprocity. Some clubs of comparable standing hold arrangements. Your own secretary will know whether yours does; you will not find out by ringing Wentworth.
5. A pro-am or open event. Occasional competitive access exists, usually tied to the tournament or to charity fundraising.

The Edinburgh and East are marginally more attainable than the West through organised days, and a corporate booking will often place a group on one of those rather than the tournament course. It is worth establishing which course a package actually includes before committing, because the difference in what you are buying is considerable.

What does not work is turning up. Wentworth sits inside a gated private estate and access to the grounds themselves is controlled. The general conventions of visitor golf at English clubs, and the far larger number of excellent courses that genuinely welcome visitors, are set out in the Surrey heath belt guide, which is the more useful page if what you actually want is a round in this part of Surrey next month.

How the fee and membership model works in principle

This page does not publish figures, and any figure you find elsewhere for Wentworth should be treated with scepticism because the terms have been restructured within living memory. The structure, however, is describable.

A club of this type typically operates a joining fee — a one-off payment on election, sometimes substantial and sometimes refundable in part — alongside an annual subscription. Categories are graded: full playing membership, various restricted categories such as weekday or country membership for those living beyond a set distance, and junior and intermediate rates for younger members. On a residential estate there is usually a relationship between property ownership and membership eligibility, though the two are not necessarily automatic.

Election is by application and normally requires proposal and seconding by existing members, with a waiting period. Where demand exceeds capacity, a list operates.

1. 1ApplicationMade by the candidate, normally with a proposer and a seconder who are already members.
2. 2Waiting periodWhere demand exceeds capacity a list operates, and the wait can run to years.
3. 3ElectionBy the club under its own rules, rather than by payment alone.
4. 4Joining feeA one-off payment on election, sometimes substantial and sometimes partly refundable.
5. 5Annual subscriptionPaid thereafter and graded by category: full, weekday, country, intermediate, junior.

The general structure at private members' clubs in England, not a statement of Wentworth's current terms, which are not published here.

Guest fees sit on top of all this and are the number relevant to most readers, since a guest round is the realistic route in. The general economics of club membership across England — what joining fees are for, why annual subscriptions vary as much as they do, and what you actually get for them — are explained in golf club membership costs in England.

Getting to Virginia Water, and what tournament week is like

Wentworth is at Virginia Water, close to junction 13 of the M25 and to the A30, which puts it within an hour of central London outside peak times and considerably more inside them. Heathrow is close, which is why the club draws an international membership.

By train, Virginia Water station is on the line from London Waterloo towards Reading and Weybridge, and the journey is under an hour. The station is a short taxi ride from the club, and on tournament days a shuttle usually operates.

Tournament week changes the area entirely. Local roads carry far more traffic than usual, parking is directed to temporary fields on the estate, and the walk from car park to entrance is longer than people expect. The practical advice is the same as at any big English sporting event: come by train if you can, come early if you cannot, and accept that leaving immediately after the final putt means queueing.

For spectators the West is unusually good ground to watch golf on. The closing holes are close together, the amphitheatre around 18 gives a genuine grandstand feel, and the tree corridors mean you can stand near enough to see the ball flight properly rather than watching a distant speck. If you are planning a week of English sport around it, the England hub collects the travel and venue guides, and the wider golf section covers the professional calendar these courses sit inside.