Ross-on-Wye - Gloucestershire - England

Although The Ross-on-Wye Golf Club was founded in 1903, the club moved several times before a densely forested tract of land became available at Jays Green in the early 1960s.

C.K. Cotton, the chosen architect, was quick to pronounce that the site was too hilly and the forest would be supremely challenging to develop into a golf course. However, after much cajoling from committee members he relented and prepared several possible layouts.

In the summer of 1961 the lumberjacks came in and started carving their way through the forest. “My first memory was the sight of the head woodsman,” wrote Donald Steel, “then in his eighties, fuelling a woodland fire with fresh scrub and branches and cooking a lunch of bacon and eggs on the back of a carefully cleaned shovel.” A few months later, the bulldozers rolled in, clearing a path through the roots and tree stumps. After a Herculean effort, the first nine holes opened for play in 1964 and Frank Pennink officially opened the full 18-hole 6,451-yard layout in 1967 when he was the President of the English Golf Union.

It will therefore come as no surprise that the current Ross-on-Wye golf course has narrow fairways carved through chutes of trees where driving accuracy is far more important than length. Holes run in every conceivable compass direction and it is impossible to tell where you are in this maze-like, mature forest.

“There is immense variety at Ross,” wrote Frank Pennink, “and although it has more short par fours than most courses of its quality, they have exceptional features. The 2nd, 10th, 14th and 17th are really severe two-shotters, Peter Townsend once describing the 10th drive as more suited to a firing range. To make up for four short par fours, there are only three par threes, varying in length from 128, 143 and 212 yards. The 6th and 8th are genuine three-shotters. Altogether this is probably the finest new inland course constructed in these islands since the 1939–45 war and is a must for the connoisseur.”