Cleveland Golf Club

Founded in 1887, when club members first played golf on the Coatham Links, Cleveland Golf Club is the oldest golf club affiliated to the Yorkshire Union of Golf Clubs. It’s also the only links course in England’s largest golfing county.

The club’s original 9-hole course was quickly doubled in size by 1890, before Old Tom Morris arrived a few years later to suggest improvements. By the turn of the century the layout measured 5,210 yards in length, playing to a bogey of 86.

During The Great War, a large gun was positioned on the course, four holes were closed and all club competitions suspended. When the World War II came along, part of the course was used as a rifle range, curtailing activity out on the links.

Down the years, prominent architects have made course modifications, including Harry Colt. In the late 1990s, the opening and closing holes were earmarked for a housing development that never materialised. Donald Steel was called in to replace these two holes, along with the par three 13th, and he fashioned three new holes (the 14th to 16th) on land furthest from the clubhouse.

Cleveland lies just outside Redcar, close to where the River Tees empties into the North Sea, where enormous industrial structures blight the landscape immediately to the west of the course – although these are gradually being demolished.

In his book A Round of Golf on the LNER, Bernard Darwin had this to say: “the course of the Cleveland Golf Club at Redcar is as fine a piece of natural golfing country as you can imagine… at the end of the course looms a vast steel works, its tall chimneys pouring out their smoke.”

The author continues: “Look away… at the sea and the sandhills and the bents and the ground that undulates so gently and perfectly; you will feel grateful for such a piece of ground and forget about the steel works.”

Today, the course measure 6,921 yards from the back tees, playing to a par of 72. Somewhat unusually, the front nine holes are configured as three par threes, three par fours and three par fives and the outward half begins and ends with a short hole.

Hole 10 starts a strong sequence of par fours, culminating with the 431-yard 14th (“Gare”), which has the fairway doglegging left to the green. The round then finishes with a birdieable par five (“Majuba”), provided you can avoid the bunker to the front right of the home green.