Royal Worth

I attach a photograph of the card at one of the most exclusive golf clubs in the UK. It is not a links course and as a nine hole course it falls outside the remit of this site.  Many  exclusive clubs will not entertain green fee golfers, some don’t charge green fees at all.  Many have close seasons when the course is left to its own devices or changes are made.  There is even a course that only lets you play once in your lifetime.

So I mention Royal Worth in the same breath as Augusta,  Tara Iti, The Old Head at Kinsale and others of that ilk. Nor can you truthfully say that everything you  hear about it or itself proclaims can be regarded as entirely accurate but it is a golf course with some rules of it’s own.  In the interest of speed Landrovers are the preferred buggy and forward markers are required to spot and speed up play in the penal rough.  But also bear in mind the first rule is ‘No ground game’.  

This is a course that only opens for a week or two in each of the last few summers and is closed for the remaining 50 weeks of the year.  Not dis-similarly to Augusta it is also a course that can only be accessed by private invitation of an eccentric millionaire.  And like Tara Iti you will probably only play it once.  Or want to. Barring a two club Greensomes match teeing off from outside my kitchen window through a couple of miles of fields to be the first pair to hit their ball into the English Channel this was the most fun I have had in ‘rough golf’.  After hay making the grass is sufficiently short to make golf viable but the greens are great levellers unlike the surface itself.  But where else can you play with half a dozen mates at the same time and find strategically hidden beer at the appropriately named Watering Hole.  Just bear in mind rule 2 ‘Overlapped yacht to windward must keep clear’.

Thanks for a great evening’s golf