England

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England's Golf Coast is the most underrated golf destination in Britain. Three Open Championship venues, two Ryder Cup hosts, and a collection of supporting courses that would headline any golf destination in the world, all within forty minutes of each other on a stretch of Lancashire coastline that most international golfers have barely heard of.

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Royal Birkdale has hosted the Open Championship ten times, its willow scrub and towering dunes producing some of the most dramatic finishes in the championship's history. Royal Lytham and St Annes is the only Open venue not on the sea, its 206 bunkers and tight, demanding layout having tested every generation of champion since 1926. Royal Liverpool at Hoylake is where Bobby Jones began his Grand Slam in 1930, where Tiger Woods dismantled the field in 2006 without finding a single bunker all week, and where the oldest Open outside of Scotland was first played in 1897.

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Around those three anchors, the supporting cast is stronger than any comparable stretch of coastline in England. Hillside sits next door to Birkdale and is widely considered the finest links in England never to have hosted the Open, Greg Norman calling its back nine the best in Britain. Southport and Ainsdale hosted the Ryder Cup in 1933 and 1937, only the second venue in Britain ever to have done so, James Braid's redesign producing a links of genuine championship character through towering dunes and heather. Formby, shaped by five architects including Braid, Colt, and Taylor, offers one of the most naturally varied and enjoyable links rounds on the coast. And West Lancashire, founded in 1873 and the ninth oldest club in England, has hosted Open Final Qualifying and the Amateur Championship on a course that demands precision and rewards patience.

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Liverpool sits forty minutes south, one of the great cities of Britain, and the natural base for a trip that covers more ground than most golf itineraries manage in twice the time.

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Southwest of London, the heathland courses represent the golden age of English golf course design at its very best. Sunningdale's Old and New courses are two of the finest inland layouts in the world, the Old Course consistently ranked among the top 50 courses on earth and the New regarded by many as the more demanding test. Walton Heath spreads across open moorland south of the city, its Ryder Cup pedigree and James Braid design of 1904 making it unlike anything else in the south of England. The Berkshire offers 36 holes of pine-framed heathland golf of exceptional quality, the Red Course uniquely composed of six par-3s, six par-4s, and six par-5s in a routing that no other course in England replicates.

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St George's Hill is Harry Colt's self-declared masterpiece on a private estate in Weybridge, rolling through heather and silver birch on terrain that one architect described as the closest thing outside America to Pine Valley. And Swinley Forest, built on Crown land near Ascot at the instruction of Queen Victoria, operates without handicaps, without medal competitions, and with a membership that considers the course overcrowded if fifty golfers play in a single day. Colt called it his least bad course. The rest of the world calls it one of the finest in England.

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Southeast of London, three courses share a stretch of Kent coastline that has collectively hosted more Open Championships than any comparable piece of links land in England. Royal St George's at Sandwich is the grandest of them, fifteen Opens played on a course of bunkers, humps, hollows, and a finishing stretch that has decided more championships than any other in England. Princes sits directly alongside it, three nine-hole loops of excellent links golf where Gene Sarazen won the Open in 1932 by five shots and where the golf has been well worth the visit ever since. Royal Cinque Ports at Deal sits a few miles down the coast, its out-and-back layout a brutally honest examination of ball-striking and course management, the back nine playing into the prevailing southwest wind with a severity that the members describe with quiet pride and visitors describe with something closer to shock.

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Two very different kinds of golf. One exceptional trip.

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