East Sussex offers 29 clubs across a landscape that changes character within a few miles: chalk downland tumbling to the Channel, Wealden parkland thick with oaks, and pockets of heather-and-gorse heathland further north. With green fees starting from £12, there's room for a full week of contrasting golf without needing to leave the county boundary. Towns such as Eastbourne, Lewes, Hastings and Battle each have their own club, and several - Bexhill-on-Sea in particular - have more than one within easy reach of each other.
Parkland is the dominant type here, with a dozen courses set among mature trees and, often, water. Sedlescombe, near Battle, threads lakes and ponds through its back nine and adds a par-3 course for those who fancy a shorter round. Sweetwoods, on the Kent border at Edenbridge, spreads across 180 acres with natural lakes affecting nine holes, and its 14th has been picked out as one of the region's best individual holes. At the grander end sits East Sussex National at Uckfield, a Robert E Cupp design that hosted the European Open in both 1993 and 1994 and later staged a PGA European Tour event in 2016 - a reminder that this is a county that has held its own on the professional circuit.
Downland with a View
The five downs courses make the most of East Sussex's coastal high ground. Lewes Golf Club sits inside the South Downs National Park on chalk downland, with the free-draining turf keeping it playable through the wet months and undulating greens that reward accurate approach play. Seaford, designed by five-time Open Champion J H Taylor in 1907, looks out over the coast and the Rathfinny vineyards, and has recently had its irrigation and course conditioning overhauled by Ken Moodie. Eastbourne Downs and Peacehaven both trade on their views across to the coastline - Peacehaven's nine holes, laid out by James Braid in 1893, use different tee positions to create a full 18-hole test on a compact site. Royal Eastbourne, meanwhile, earned its Royal title from Queen Victoria in 1887 and counted the Amateur champion H.G. Hutchinson and Prime Minister A.J. Balfour among its early members.
Heathland and Links, North and South
Inland, the heathland courses show a different, sparer style of golf. Piltdown, founded in 1904 and designed by Jack Rowe, has no bunkers at all - just heather and gorse doing the defensive work - and its investment programme through the 2010s helped it into the Top 100 Courses in England list. Royal Ashdown Forest shares that bunkerless approach on its Old Course and has hosted both Open Championship regional qualifying and the Ladies' British Open Amateur Stroke Play Championship. Crowborough Beacon, up on one of the highest points in Sussex with views reputedly stretching 22 miles to the sea, has a genuinely storied membership roll: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle served as Club Captain in 1910, and Horace Rawlins, winner of the first US Open, once worked there as assistant professional.
Down on the coast, the three links courses give the county its most traditional seaside test. Cooden Beach, laid out by W. Herbert Fowler in 1912 on flattish lowland near Bexhill-on-Sea, relies on internal and external dykes and the coastal wind rather than heavy contouring to protect its par. Rye, designed by H.S. Colt among the Camber sandhills, has hosted the Oxford and Cambridge University match since 1911 and the President's Putter every year since 1920 - Bernard Darwin, the noted golf writer, was once its Captain.
Something for the Weekend Golfer
Away from the championship names, there's plenty of straightforward, well-run golf: Horam Park's nine holes played from double tees through mature trees and water, Parkfield's pay-and-play nine in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, and Highwoods at Bexhill, a J H Taylor and K G Hawtree design from 1924 that still stages qualifying events. Between the downland, the heath and the links strip along the coast, East Sussex rewards a golfer willing to drive twenty minutes between rounds rather than stick to one style all week.