A small county with a decent spread
North Lincolnshire won't overwhelm you with numbers, but what it lacks in volume it makes up for in variety. Six clubs sit across two main towns, Brigg and Scunthorpe, and between them you get parkland golf, a heathland test, and a resort-style layout with more holes than most counties can muster in one place. It's the kind of county where you can plan a few days of golf without repeating a course type.
Elsham Golf Club, on the edge of Brigg, is the obvious starting point for anyone wanting a sense of the area's pedigree. Founded in 1900, it plays over free-draining sandy ground through woodland, which keeps the course playable and firm underfoot for much of the year. Tony Jacklin CBE, the Open Championship winner, is an honorary member here, and the club's competitive credentials are current rather than historical — it hosted the England Golf Boys' County Finals in 2025 and the English Seniors Men's Open Amateur Championship back in 2019. That's a lot of tournament golf for one parkland course near the Humber.
Resort golf and heathland variety
Also in Brigg, Forest Pines offers something genuinely different for the county: 27 holes split across three distinct nines — Forest, Pines and Beeches. That layout gives you the flexibility to mix and match combinations depending on mood or time available, and it's the sort of facility you'd normally expect to find further south or in a dedicated golf resort area. For a county with only six clubs, having a 27-hole venue in the mix is a real point of difference.
Scunthorpe carries most of the remaining golf, and the standout there is Holme Hall, a heathland course recognised by the English Golf Union as a championship venue. Heathland golf is less common in this part of Yorkshire and the Humber than parkland, so Holme Hall's turf and terrain offer a different challenge to the county's parkland tracks — generally firmer, more textured, and less reliant on tree-lined avoidance strategies. The club also holds membership of the 1908 Golf Clubs group, which points to a long-standing place in the English golfing landscape rather than a recent arrival.
Parkland golf around Scunthorpe
Ashby Decoy, also in Scunthorpe, is the other parkland course of note, sitting alongside Elsham as one of the county's two named parkland clubs in this sample. Parkland is the dominant style here, and it suits club golfers who want tree-defined holes, generally calmer conditions than you'd find on an exposed links, and courses that reward accuracy over raw distance. Messingham Grange and Normanby Hall round out the Scunthorpe golfing scene, giving the town a genuine cluster of options within a short drive of each other.
Taken together, North Lincolnshire works well as a short golfing break rather than a single-round detour. You could open with Elsham's parkland test and its Open-champion pedigree, spend an afternoon exploring two of Forest Pines' three nines, and finish with the different demands of Holme Hall's heathland turf — all without leaving the Brigg-to-Scunthorpe corridor. It's not a county that shouts about itself, but the golf on offer is varied enough to reward a proper look.