I leave it to Patric Dickinson with his colourful description of the turf at the Mildenhall 9.
The turf through the green has all the quality, without the looseness of texture, of seaside turf: it is dry and springy but more closely knit and it holds the ball without favour-it has the sense of a first-rate prose style-direct, without frills, yet without concessions, with certain quirks of mordant wit, but over-all with a wonderful fluency and power. You replace the turf with respect. Several notices tell you to do so. This is no place for the golfing spiv.
The greens are pure poetry:
My myne of precious stones, my empirie,
How blest am I in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds is to be free…
It is no use imagining that even an indifferent putt will do. If you have the freedom of the greens at Mildenhall you know how to putt: you can putt anywhere. There seems to be a consistency of soil here which is unyielding, hard yet viable. The feel to the foot is unlike anywhere else. Some of the secret, again, is this seasideness-found-inland: yes, the greens here are like swimming in a mountain lake, as compared with the sea. The lake is clear cold--you can see to the bottom; and it is unresilient, not buoyant as salt. On good seaside greens you still get a sea-quality—ones ball is buoyant, it floats, if you are putting well, and sometimes reaches the hole on a line you do not see. At Mildenhall, never. A belly-flopper of an approach will not do. The approach must be clean, the putt perfectly timed and struck: then the reward-to stand and watch, with certainty, the long putt going home to the bottom--a marvellous clear-water feeling. I know of no other greens that are so utterly scrupulous. Putting upon them is a sheer aesthetic delight-in one’s own skill pitted against the best of the greenkeeper’s. If Plato had played golf, there was the place for him Ideally to Putt