Hartlepool

Hartlepool Golf Club is located on the North Sea coast to the north of Hartlepool and this par 70 course bears the design stamp of Willie Park Jr. and James Braid who reworked some of the holes between the dunes.

According to the book James Braid and his Four Hundred Courses by John F. Moreton & Iain Cumming, “if you can find the course, the entrance being under the railway through a horseshoe arch, you will meet a “mixed” course, partly “links” in the dunes, mostly on quick-draining agricultural land.

Originally nine holes, Hartlepool in 1911 became a full eighteen holes, the designer being Willie Park Junior. In the autumn of 1929 Braid was engaged to provide a bunkering plan, a brief widened to include any alterations he thought fit. Braid, respectful of his countryman’s designing skill, concentrated on the central holes: 9 becoming a dogleg, 10, another par 4, pushed into the dunes and containing a blind second shot, 11 a daunting par 3, which grew to 240 but which is now 216 yards, across a ravine along the shoreline, and 12, also a par 3, played from a high tee, in the opposite direction, to a green down below and well-bunkered. And all his bunkering recommendations were promptly carried out.

Since Braid’s time, changes have been few. A new clubhouse after World War II necessitated renumbering. The selling of the old clubhouse meant the loss of the old 1st, 17th and 18th high up there on the plateau land in the south part of the course. A new 2nd and 3rd were constructed in 1963. The 17th was lengthened in 1983.”