I had the great fortune of playing Delamere Forest just a few days ago.
The course turned out to be a huge surprise and a perfect finish to my trip to Wales and England. The golf course is a beautiful heathland course built over very open and undulating open land. The sub-soil is sandy and the property plays fast and firm under these conditions. The golf course has it all from sweeping panoramas, accents of heather, wonderful long undulations in the fairways, elevated tee shots, greens on grade, plateau greens and the most beautiful clubhouse clearly in view from half the course.
The golf course is friendly with ample room off the tee, some holes were lined with trees while most others are framed in by long fescue, but always there were openings out to the surrounding landscape beyond. The rolling land, views into the surrounding hill and copses of spruce, pine and oak made this a beautiful English Landscape that Capability Brown would have been impressed by.
The opening set of long par fours is absolutely brilliant. As Mark illustrated, they were part of the changes made by Fowler when he returned to expand the course in the 1920’s. In fact all the fours on the front are challenging, interesting, make perfect use of the terrain and ask for a completely different approach from the previous one. The threes are also top notch with the uphill 4th into a bowl and the downhill 6th into a crown being a tough set of threes. It’s only the breather of a par five that prevents this from being one of the best nines in golf. As far as I’m concerned the front is that good!
The nines turned out to be real contrast. The front is big and strong whereas the back nine is much shorter and more quirky. There were some really cool shorter holes like the cross-sloped 13th, which reminded me of the brilliant 15th at Garden City. The downhill 14th may be the prettiest with its feeder slope in the fairway and slightly elevated green back dropped by the forest, but the quirkiest and perhaps coolest hole of all was the short 15th played to a very Mackenzie like 15th elevated green. My favourite three is the16th where the wind complicates the tee shot to this long par three, but the player can either fly or feed the ball into the green using the surroundings slopes. The back nine has more options and more opportunity than the front and is where a player looks to score.
The golf course was full of excellent lessons in design. I’m quite interested in all the greens that are set “into” the land rather than placed “onto” a promontory. Fowler used this at a number of the courses we saw over the week. It’s not as flashy an approach, but does lend a certain subtle charm that is rare in golf there days.
Contour played a major role off the tee, and rather than supplement a bunker into the roll in the land for emphasis, he often took the bunkering to the outside. I found it made you take on the terrain rather than the bunkering, which was an interesting idea that I rarely see in other places. We are so conditioned to bunker the upslope that an opposite approach was refreshing.
Delamere is exactly the course I would like to join. They have a friendly membership that plays fast. The golf course is a pleasure to play, whether your on or struggling. It’s simply a beautiful place that has everything you could possibly want and great golf too. I feel very fortunate to have played there.