COURSE DEVELOPMENT Our aim has and will always be, one of continuous improvement; we never rest on our laurels and the accolades we have received over the years. We are relentless in our desire to make one of the UK's best golf courses, even better for both our members and visitors alike. We are delighted to have appointed Danny Murray as our Courses Manager, in February 2021. Danny joined us from The Wisley Golf Club where he had previously been the Operations Manager leading a team of 40, managing the day-to-day preparation of the 27-hole golf complex. Danny's focus is on developing and improving the golf courses with his moto  "to be tournament ready everyday"...

Most Recent Course Report (9.5.2023)

I hope you all had a great weekend celebrating the Kings Coronation and managed to catch up with friends and family over the bank holiday weekend. It has been a few weeks since my last report, so I wanted to update you on where we are at with the golf course.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock you will have seen that the weather hasn’t been too nice to us! Very cold overnight and very wet during the day! But we have managed to get things moving along nicely. The biggest surprise in my opinion is the condition of the greens (and thank you all for your feedback) because after seeding during maintenance, I have raised the height of cut on the green and cut down on the frequency of rolling as I allow our seed to flourish. You can clearly see the new bent grass coming through nicely which is pleasing to my eye!! Please remember that is our maintenance on the greens over until late October. We can sit back and watch other clubs go through the pain of this operation in the summer whilst we welcome some of the finest amateur golfers in the country to do battle on our famous heathland course. I am going to give you a tip for anyone playing in the ‘Open Qualifier’, the pace of the greens at the moment (around 10.3) will be the speed on qualifying day.

We have had a really good report back from the R&A about the condition and presentation of our golf course (Click Here to view) and we have also received very promising test results on our organic matter content and plant nutrition, this means we must be doing something right!

Before you think it…. Don’t worry I am not planning on keeping green speeds at this pace until the qualifier!! In the next couple of weeks (when I am happy with the new seed coverage) we will be dropping heights of cut and increasing the rolling as we build up to Captains Day on June 10th. I will then have to back off to drop the speeds back down for the end of June then pick it back up again!!

I believe we made the right decision to keep preferred lies on the fairways until the end of May as I am hearing some horror stories for those who took them off at the end of April. I am really happy again with the seed that is coming through and for those that have played, I am sure you can’t help but notice this. Once the grass plant is hard enough, I will be spraying the daises that pop up on some of our fairways (probably end of the month) and that will further enhance the fairway. By early June, our fairways and approaches will look so good you could eat your dinner off them!!

These bank holidays have made things incredibly tough, and I will be glad when they are all over!! At times, our fairways and roughs have shot up and have been hard to keep on top of. Some late-night mowing has been required to keep it from reaching the jungle stage. All in all, we are entering the season in the strongest position we have in years, we just need some dry weather now. This course does feel like its playing long at the moment, but normal service will resume when it dries out again which it no doubt will come late June.

Hope you enjoyed the read.

Thank you,

Danny