A county built for parkland golfers
County Durham's golf is dominated by parkland, and that shows in the numbers: thirteen of the county's twenty clubs fall into that category, against two heathland courses and a single moorland layout at Crook. What sets much of this parkland apart is the ground it sits on. Brancepeth Castle Golf Club plays across a genuine castle deer park, its clubhouse converted from the estate's old stables and coach house, on a course laid out by Harry Colt in 1924. Chester-le-Street Golf Club runs alongside Lumley Castle and the River Wear, with the Emirates Durham International Cricket Ground visible beyond the fairways, and was designed jointly by two Open Championship winners, Sandy Herd and Ted E Ray. Bishop Auckland Golf Club, founded in 1894, wraps around the Bishop's Palace and the Wear too, and once hosted an exhibition featuring James Braid and Harry Vardon back in 1906.
Henry Cotton's fingerprints are all over the county. He redesigned Beamish Park Golf Club in 1963, a course set in a former deer park near Beamish Hall and the Beamish Open Air Museum, and he also designed Castle Eden Golf Club at Hartlepool, where the par-3 seventeenth is the signature hole and the eighth demands a hundred-yard carry over a ravine. Harry Vardon, meanwhile, put his name to the redesign at Consett & District, a hundred-acre course in the Derwent Valley near the Northumberland border, known for tree-lined fairways and plateau greens.
Heathland at South Moor, moorland at Crook
The heathland golf is where the county's reputation really sharpens. South Moor Golf Club in Stanley was designed by Dr Alister MacKenzie, the man behind Augusta National, Cypress Point and Royal Melbourne, and it's regularly rated among the top three courses in the county. Its gorse, heather, birch and bracken mark it out as one of only forty heathland courses in the UK, and the large, sloping MacKenzie-style greens are the real test. It hosted the McGregor Trophy English under-16s championship in 2011. Seaham Golf Club offers the county's other heathland round, close to Seaham Harbour, with a signature 13th and a card weighted towards five par 3s and three par 5s.
For something different again, Crook Golf Club is the county's lone moorland course, set against the Durham and North Yorkshire hills. Its small greens are locally described as