Adrian's post highlights what a complicated mess modern society has made out of something that worked effortlessly for +/- 100 years.
I agree with Sean that Cleeve Cloud would benefit from positive publicity and I'm sorry I am no longer in position to provide it. When I was writing up The Confidential Guide, I had Cleeve on my itinerary to see, but it poured rain that day and we had to skip it. Had I seen it then, it might be in the front of the book, and Painswick would be the one threatening to close today.
[I did include it in the second printing, but did not reorganize everything to change the content in the Gourmet's Choice.]
Painswick, Cleeve and Minchinhampton Old are an entire class of golf courses that are not well represented in the literature of the game, and indeed anywhere but here on GCA. Links golf and heathland golf are celebrated and some of the little hidden gems are fetishized, but these commons courses [or whatever is the correct term] were passed over by Darwin and Sir Peter Allen and The Confidential Guide, and are pretty much unknown on this side of the Atlantic. Of course, a big part of the problem is that they are all in England and England does not spend money promoting golf the way Scotland and Ireland do.
It would be great if they had a collective identity and a little golf trail all their own, but after reading Adrian's post, I see how difficult that would be in the present era, and it saddens me.