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Golf club

Radworth Golf Club

Above Harewood Avenue

A red-brick pavilion clubhouse with a hipped roof and white trim on a grassy rise, a big oak tree to its left, under a clear blue sky.

Eighteen holes on the rising ground north of the estate, par 72, six thousand four hundred and nineteen yards, with a 1928-style pavilion clubhouse on its own knoll eight and a half metres above the road, at the top of a drive two hundred metres long. The deep verandah faces due north, straight down over the eighteenth green, the first tee and the ninth green.

Every green has its flag in the cup and every tee its pair of white markers, and the flags fly in the town’s own wind. Whatever is bending the trees on Harewood Avenue is snapping the flag on the eighteenth, and it is working on your ball as well. A round is thirty-eight pounds on a weekday and forty-eight at the weekend, and if you’re skint the club will let you play three holes for twelve.

The planting is the thing. Two hundred and seventy-four trees across six species: seventy-nine oaks, forty-one each of beech, birch and pine, thirty-seven poplars, the tallest of them past thirty metres, and thirty-five hornbeams. Ferns grow only where there is a tree within fourteen metres to shade them, the wildflowers come in drifts, and two hundred and twelve gorse bushes in twenty-six patches carry their chrome-yellow flowers across the rough. A post-and-rail fence runs round the edge, with four hundred metres of the Harewood Avenue frontage deliberately left open.

The rabbits got there first: forty-three of them in seven groups, each group with one sat up keeping lookout, and every one within a short dash of a tree. Then the rooks, forty-four in four flocks, working the short grass. The molehills run in lines rather than scattered about, seventy-nine of them along fourteen tunnels, because that is how moles actually work, and every line stops short of a green.

Golf here is built to play like a proper PC golf game rather than a minigame bolted on the side: eighteen holes, a full bag of clubs, and the town’s own wind on every shot.

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