North Northamptonshire is not a large county for golf, but what it offers is consistent: parkland courses laid over gently rolling ground, mostly dating from the late Victorian period, and clustered around a handful of towns that grew up alongside the railways and the boot and shoe trade. Kettering, Wellingborough, Peterborough, Pytchley and Weldon each have a club to their name, and together they give a fair picture of what inland golf in this part of the East Midlands looks like.
Parkland is the dominant theme here, and it shows in the way these courses were built: on old agricultural land, often with mature trees left standing from earlier field boundaries, and with streams or ridge-and-furrow contours worked into the design rather than against it. There is little in the way of dramatic elevation change, but the better courses use their natural features cleverly.
The oldest clubs and their roots
Kettering Golf Club has been playing golf since 1891, and it still runs on the traditional club rhythm of weekly competitions and seasonal tournaments, with PGA-qualified professionals on hand and a junior section to bring golfers through. Wellingborough Golf Club shares that 1893 founding date and has a design pedigree worth noting: the original course was laid out by Old Tom Morris, with Tom Williamson adding a nine-hole layout in 1923 before the current course took shape in 1975. It sits on 160 acres of rolling parkland at Harrowden Hall, and Today's Golfer picked out its finishing hole as among the best in its March 2012 issue. The club has hosted PGA and county events, and a full irrigation system was installed in 2023, which should keep those USGA-standard greens in good order for some time.
Oundle Golf Club, based near Peterborough, dates from the same era, 1893, and occupies 99 acres of rolling parkland with a brook running through it close to the town of Oundle. It is affiliated to England Golf and the Ladies Golf Union, holds Safe Golf Accreditation, and hosts County Championship competitions, which says something about the standard of its greens and setup.
Newer ground and different formats
Rushden Golf Club, in Wellingborough, has a slightly more layered history. It opened in 1909 as a nine-hole course and was not extended to 18 holes until 2013, so the back nine is still relatively young in golfing terms, with newly planted trees maturing alongside undulating fairways and greens. The land itself was originally agricultural, and the ridge-and-furrow ploughing contours from that earlier use remain part of the challenge. Unusually for the area, the ground is owned by the Duchy of Lancaster, which adds a bit of historical weight to a course still finding its full character.
For golfers after something shorter or more casual, The Pytchley Golf Lodge offers a different proposition: a nine-hole pay-and-play parkland course opened in 2000 and designed by Roger Griffiths Associates of Rugby. Its tree-lined fairways, water features and bunkers are built around USGA standard greens, making it a useful option for a quick round or a warm-up before tackling one of the county's longer 18-hole layouts. Priors Hall Golf Club in Weldon rounds out the county's spread, giving golfers in the north of the area a course closer to home.
Planning a visit
With six clubs across five towns, North Northamptonshire rewards a bit of planning rather than spontaneous course-hopping, but the range is real: a Duchy-owned estate, an Old Tom Morris pedigree, a modern pay-and-play nine, and clubs still running the kind of weekly competition calendar that has kept English club golf going for well over a century.