Winter Golf Rules In England: Mats, Temporaries And More

The first cold morning of an English autumn usually announces itself on a laminated sheet by the first tee. Preferred lies in operation on closely mown areas, place within a scorecard's length, no nearer the hole. Two greens are temporary. Buggies off. Below that, in smaller type, a line about whether the day's competition is being played for handicap. Most golfers read the first sentence, ignore the rest, and then argue about it in the bar in February.

Winter golf in England runs on a set of arrangements that are genuinely governed by the Rules of Golf but are not part of them by default. Almost everything on that sheet is a Local Rule the club has chosen to adopt, and the choices differ from club to club and from month to month. Knowing which parts are optional, which parts are fixed, and which parts quietly change whether your score counts is the difference between playing winter golf properly and guessing at it for five months of the year.

Preferred lies: what the Local Rule actually says

Preferred lies — "winter rules", "lift, clean and place", or in older clubhouses simply "bumping it" — is a Model Local Rule. It appears in the Committee Procedures section of the Official Guide to the Rules of Golf as Model Local Rule E-3, and a club adopts it by publishing it, not by everybody assuming it applies.

The wording matters, because it defines three things the player has to get right.

The first is where it applies. The standard adoption covers a ball lying in a part of the general area cut to fairway height or less. That is a narrower definition than most golfers use: it includes fairways, closely mown paths through rough and, at some clubs, the fringes of greens, but it does not include the rough, and it never includes bunkers or penalty areas. A committee may extend the rule to the whole general area if conditions are bad enough, and in a very wet English January some do, but that extension has to be stated. If the notice says "closely mown areas" and your ball is in the semi, you play it as it lies.

The second is the size of the relief area. The model rule offers the committee a choice — commonly one club-length, one scorecard length, or six inches — and the club must specify which. This is not a detail. Six inches gets a ball out of a pitch mark; a club-length can move it onto a different piece of turf entirely. Read the sheet.

The third is that relief is taken once. You mark, lift, place, and the ball is then in play. If you place it and dislike the result, you cannot pick it up and try again. If the ball moves after you have placed it and it has come to rest, the normal rules for a ball moved by natural forces apply and you generally play it from where it stops.

Preferred lies exists for two reasons, and only one of them is about fairness to the player. The other is agronomic: on soft ground, taking a divot every shot removes turf that will not regrow until March, and a rule that encourages a cleaner strike from a placed ball reduces the damage the membership does to its own fairways over a winter.

Marking, lifting, cleaning and placing, in the right order

The procedure is short and people still get it wrong, usually by skipping the first step.

Mark the spot. The model rule requires the ball's position to be marked before it is lifted, and there is a penalty for lifting without marking, so a tee peg, a coin or a ball marker goes down first. "I know where it was" is not marking.

Lift the ball. Clean it as much as you like — the whole point in a wet December is that you can.

Place it within the specified relief area, not nearer the hole. Measure the relief area from the marked spot, and remember that the relief area is in the general area only: you cannot place into a bunker, onto a green, or out of a penalty area, and if the rule is limited to closely mown ground you cannot place into rough either.

The ball must come to rest on the spot where you placed it. On a sloping wet fairway it sometimes will not. The rules give you a second attempt at the same spot, and if it still will not stay, you place it at the nearest spot where it will, not nearer the hole.

Two habits are worth building. Put the ball back on ground of the same quality rather than teeing it up on a tuft — placing it on a raised clump is legal under most adoptions but is exactly the behaviour that makes people sceptical about winter rules in the first place. And do it quickly. A fourball that marks, lifts, cleans and places on every shot adds a startling amount of time to a round, which in December means finishing in the dark.

What preferred lies does not cover

It does not cover a ball plugged in rough. It does not cover a bad lie in a divot on the fairway — although some clubs adopt a separate Local Rule for that, and if they have, it will say so. It does not cover mud on the ball outside the closely mown areas. And it does not apply in a bunker, where the ball is played as it lies regardless of how much water sits around it, unless the bunker itself has been declared ground under repair.

Do winter scores count towards your handicap?

They do, and this is the single most common misunderstanding on an English winter tee.

Under the old CONGU system there was a defined active season for handicapping, and scores outside it largely did not count. That structure went when the World Handicap System came into use across Great Britain and Ireland in November 2020. There is now no winter suspension. A round played in January over a rated course, under the Rules of Golf, in a format that produces an acceptable score, is acceptable and should be returned like any other.

Preferred lies do not change that. The Course Rating already assumes a course in normal condition, and the handicap system's daily adjustment for playing conditions is designed to absorb days that play harder or easier than the rating implies. A soft, long, cold course usually plays harder, and the adjustment tends to move in the player's favour rather than against.

The requirements that do have to be met are the ordinary ones. The round is over 18 holes or a designated 9. The course has a current Course Rating and Slope Rating for the tees played. General play rounds are pre-registered before you go out, which is the rule that catches people every winter — a fine score you did not declare beforehand does not count, and there is no retrospective fix. The mechanics of how the index is then calculated are set out in our guide to the World Handicap System in the UK.

What can make a winter round non-acceptable is a course that has been altered too far from the layout that was rated. That is the subject of the next section, and it is where the genuine complexity sits.

The argument you will hear in the bar

The objection to counting winter scores is always some version of the same thing: the course is easier because you are placing the ball, so indexes drift downwards over the winter and everyone starts the spring playing off too little. It is a reasonable-sounding argument and it does not survive contact with the arithmetic.

Preferred lies improve the lie. They do nothing about a fairway that returns no roll, a cold ball that carries shorter, greens that hold nothing and release nothing, a wind that has not stopped since October, and four hours of play in poor light. The net effect at most English clubs is that winter rounds score worse than summer ones, not better, and the system's playing-conditions adjustment is designed precisely to detect a day when the whole field scores away from expectation and to move the day's differentials accordingly.

The second objection — that people cheat more in winter, teeing the ball up in the fairway under cover of the local rule — is a real behavioural point rather than a systemic one. It is dealt with by playing with people who do not do it, and by marking properly yourself.

Temporary greens, temporary tees and the rating problem

A Course Rating is a measurement of a specific golf course played from specific tees over a specific distance. Move the tees forward, take four greens out of play and put the flags on flat patches of fairway, and you are no longer playing the course that was rated.

Handicapping guidance in Great Britain and Ireland handles this with a tolerance. Small changes are absorbed; large ones are not. The tolerance is expressed as a difference in total measured length between the course as set up on the day and the course as rated, and the figure is published by the national association rather than being a matter for the club to decide. Committees are expected to check it and to declare a round non-acceptable when the set-up falls outside.

Rather than repeat a number that has been restated more than once, the honest advice is to look at the current England Golf guidance or ask your handicap secretary — and, more practically, to accept that this is the committee's job and not yours. If the club has declared the competition non-qualifying, that decision stands. If it has not, return the card.

Two further points are worth knowing. A temporary green is generally not a putting green in the sense the Rules use it, which affects relief, the rule about touching your line, and whether you may repair damage the way you would on a real green — the club's notice should say how the temporaries are to be treated. And holes played to a temporary green are still holes played; you do not omit them from the card.

Winter alteration	Usual effect on the round	Usual effect on handicap acceptability
Preferred lies in force	Cleaner lies on closely mown ground	None — score still acceptable
One or two temporary greens	Short, flat putting surfaces; length barely changes	Normally still acceptable
Several temporaries plus forward tees	Course materially shorter than rated	Committee must check the length tolerance
Compulsory mats in the general area	Play from an artificial surface	Round sits outside the Rules; treated as non-acceptable
Course reduced to a composite or shortened loop	A different course from the one rated	Not acceptable unless separately rated

Mats, winter tees and the yardage they quietly change

Artificial mats on teeing areas are ordinary English winter practice. They protect the tee surface at the time of year when divots do not heal, and they are usually laid in front of the winter tee markers or on a separate mat tee altogether. Playing from a mat on the teeing area is generally accepted and does not, on the usual reading, take the round outside the Rules.

Mats in the general area are a different question. The Rules of Golf contain no Local Rule permitting a player to be required to play a ball from an artificial surface in the general area, so a competition run on that basis is not being played under the Rules, and the established position in England is that scores made under such a condition are not acceptable for handicap. Clubs that use fairway mats generally know this and run those events as social. If you are unsure, ask before you enter rather than after you win.

The yardage effect is worth thinking about because almost nobody does. Winter tees at an English parkland club are frequently well forward of the summer plates — sometimes on the previous hole's ground, sometimes on a mat set into the fairway. A hole you know as a driver and a seven-iron becomes a driver and a wedge on the card and, because the ground is soft and the ball is not running, still plays like a driver and a seven-iron in the air. The number on the scorecard stops being a reliable guide, and pacing off a yardage from a marker post is more useful in winter than at any other time of year.

Cold air compounds it. Air is denser when it is cold, the ball comes off the face slower when both ball and clubhead are cold, and carry falls. Add a soggy fairway that returns no roll at all, and a shot that finishes pin-high in July finishes twenty yards short of the green in January off the same swing. Take more club than you think, every time.

Frost delays and why the greens close before the fairways

A frost delay is not caution. It is the single most consequential turf-protection decision a greenkeeper makes all year.

When grass freezes, the water inside the leaf and inside the crown at the base of the plant forms ice crystals. Those crystals are rigid. The weight of a golfer's foot pressing the frozen leaf sideways shears the cell walls from the inside, and the plant dies. Nothing appears at the time — the damage is invisible on the morning it happens — and then, days later, the traffic pattern emerges as black or straw-coloured footprints across the green. On a putting surface cut to a few millimetres, with a limited root system and no meaningful growth until soil temperatures rise in spring, that damage can still be visible in April.

This is why courses close greens rather than the whole course. On a light frost a club will often open with temporaries, keeping traffic off the real surfaces while the fairways, cut far longer and with far more leaf to protect the crown, take the wear without lasting harm. On a hard frost, or on the far more damaging morning when a frozen surface is thawing over still-frozen ground, the whole course usually closes, because the thawing layer shears against the frozen layer beneath and footprints go deep.

The decision rests with the club, normally with the head greenkeeper, and it is not a negotiation. Two practical consequences: check the club's website or phone before travelling on a cold morning, because a delay decided at seven o'clock will not appear on a booking system you looked at the night before; and when a course does open late, expect the tee sheet to be compressed and pace of play to suffer for the rest of the day.

Frost is also why so much English winter golf gets played in the afternoon. Grounds that are unplayable at eight are often perfect at half past eleven, and the golfers who play through the winter learn to book accordingly.

Temporary water, plugged balls and free relief in a wet English winter

Three of the ordinary Rules of Golf do most of the work in a wet winter, and none of them is a winter rule at all.

Temporary water. The Rules use the term for any temporary accumulation of water on the surface of the ground that is visible before or after you take your stance without pressing down excessively. If you can see it seeping around your shoes when you settle into the address position, it counts. It gives free relief in the general area under the abnormal course conditions rule: find the nearest point of complete relief — complete meaning from the lie, the stance and the swing — and drop within one club-length of it, no nearer the hole. Note the word nearest. It is the nearest point, not the nicest one, and it can perfectly well be in rough.

Plugged balls. Since the 2019 revision, free relief for a ball embedded in its own pitch mark applies anywhere in the general area, not just on closely mown ground. Drop within one club-length of the spot immediately behind where it was embedded, no nearer the hole. A club may adopt a Local Rule restricting that relief to areas cut to fairway height, and some do, so this is another line on the notice board worth reading. In a soft English winter, plugged balls in rough are constant, and knowing whether your club has restricted the relief is worth several shots a round.

Ground under repair. Marked areas, greenkeepers' work in progress and turf laid over winter drainage lines all give free relief in the same way. So does a hole made by a burrowing animal, which in parts of England means rabbit scrapes on sandy ground.

The one place free relief is limited is the bunker. A bunker full of water still gives free relief, but only within the bunker, at the point of maximum available relief if complete relief is impossible. Taking the ball out of the bunker altogether costs a penalty stroke, dropping on a line back from the hole. In a January downpour that penalty drop is often the right play, and refusing it on principle has cost more good rounds than bad putting.

Bunkers under repair, ground under repair and the raking question

English bunkers do not enjoy winter. Sand washes down faces in heavy rain, revetted edges collapse, and the drainage under an older bunker fails long before anyone budgets to replace it.

Clubs respond in one of three ways, and they should tell you which. Some leave bunkers in play and accept that the sand is a mess. Some declare all bunkers ground under repair, which turns them into free-relief areas — a substantial change to how the course plays, and one that makes any competition feel considerably easier. Some declare individual bunkers under repair with a stake or a rope. Whichever applies, it is a Local Rule and it belongs on the sheet.

Raking policy has become genuinely variable. Rakes are sometimes removed entirely over winter, and when they are, some clubs add a Local Rule allowing a ball in a footprint or an unraked area to be smoothed and replaced, and some do not. If the rakes are gone and there is no notice, the default is unchanged: play it as it lies. Bringing your own rake is not a solution — you may smooth sand after your shot, but not before it if doing so improves your lie or line of play.

The etiquette side is simple and often ignored. Enter and leave a wet bunker at the lowest point, because climbing a soaked revetted face pulls the turf out and costs a greenkeeper a morning's work. Broader conventions about care of the course are covered in our guide to golf etiquette and dress codes in England.

Winter leagues and the competitions clubs actually run

The English winter fixture list has its own character, built around formats that cope with cold, dark and small fields.

The winter league proper is usually a pairs knockout or a series of team matches run over months, played in fourballs or greensomes, with fixtures arranged between the players rather than on set dates. It exists to give people a reason to play in February, and its scheduling flexibility is the whole point.

Scrambles and Texas scrambles fill the Saturday sheet because they are quick and forgiving, and because a beginner can contribute without holding anyone up. Stableford dominates individual play, since it lets a player pick up on a hole gone wrong and keeps the field moving in bad light.

Roll-ups — an informal group that meets at a fixed time, draws for partners and plays for very little money — are the backbone of winter golf at most English clubs, and they are the easiest way for a new member to get to know people. The eclectic, where you keep your best score on each hole across a whole winter's rounds, is the other traditional format, and it rewards persistence rather than a single good day.

Most of these are run as non-qualifying, either because the course is outside its rated set-up or because the format does not produce an acceptable score. That does not make them pointless. It makes them the part of the year where the competitive side of a club runs on enjoyment rather than on handicap movement.

Kit that makes an English winter round bearable

Winter golf in England is lost to discomfort more often than to weather. The people still playing in February are simply better equipped.

Layers beat bulk. Two or three thin layers under a windproof mid-layer allow a full turn; a heavy jacket does not, and a restricted backswing in the cold is how people hurt their backs. Waterproof trousers kept in the bag and put on at the first sign of rain are worth more than any club in the set.

Grip is the practical problem. Cold, wet hands on a wet grip cause more bad shots in winter than technique does. Wet-weather gloves, worn as a pair, grip better when soaked than a leather glove does dry. Two towels — one hanging, one kept dry inside the bag or under the umbrella — is the standard arrangement. Winter grips, or simply grips replaced before the season rather than after it, make a real difference.

Footing matters more than people expect. Soft ground and worn soles produce slips, and a slip on a downswing is both a bad shot and an injury risk. Shoes with intact soft spikes, or proper winter boots, are the single best purchase for an English winter.

Then the small things: a woolly hat, because most of the heat loss is real; a spare glove in a sealed bag; a rain hood for the bag; and enough balls, because a ball that plugs in wet rough is frequently gone for good. Playing in genuinely rough weather is a skill of its own, and we cover the technique side of it in our guide to playing golf in wind and rain.

Links, heathland and parkland through an English winter

The single biggest determinant of what your winter golf looks like is what your course sits on, and no amount of greenkeeping overcomes geology.

Links land is sand, and sand drains. A true links takes an enormous amount of rain and keeps playing, which is why the courses on the Lancashire and Kent coasts stay open on their proper greens when inland clubs are on temporaries. The ball still runs, the turf stays firm, and the golf in January is recognisably the same game as the golf in July, just colder and considerably windier. What makes those courses distinctive is set out in our guide to links golf in England.

Heathland sits on sand and gravel too, and behaves much the same way. The Surrey and Berkshire belt was built on that soil precisely because it drains, and winter golf there is among the best in England — firm underfoot, heather dormant, the trees bare enough to see the routing properly.

Parkland on clay is the hard case, and it is where most English golfers play. Clay holds water at the surface, roots sit shallow, and traffic compacts the ground further with every wet round. This is the soil that produces temporary greens from November to March, trolley bans, buggy bans and the winter tee mats. Clubs on it spend most of their capital budget on drainage and never quite finish. The differences between soil types and how they shape the golf are covered in more detail in our guide to parkland golf courses in England.

Knowing which you have tells you what to expect. It also tells you where to go for a winter away day, and why golfers within reach of the coast or the heath spend the dark months there. More of the site's coverage of the English game sits in the golf section and on the England hub.

One last thing about the notice board. It changes. A sheet pinned up in November may be superseded in January, and the version that governs your round is the one displayed on the day, not the one you remember. Reading it takes fifteen seconds and settles almost every argument the winter produces.