A small county with a long memory
Nottingham doesn't have a sprawling golf landscape, but what it lacks in numbers it makes up for in pedigree. Four clubs sit within the city, and two of them carry genuine weight in the game's history. This is not a county you visit for variety of terrain — the courses here are set within the city itself rather than scattered across coast or countryside — but the golf on offer has depth once you look past the small headline count.
Bulwell Forest: the county's oldest test
Bulwell Forest Golf Club, founded in 1889, is the oldest golf course in Nottinghamshire, and it wears that history well. J.H. Taylor shot a 75 here in 1895, and Harry Vardon played the course in 1900 — two of the game's founding greats leaving their mark on the same 18 holes still played today. Locals rate it as the best winter course in the county, which matters in a part of England where clay soils elsewhere can turn heavy from autumn onwards. It's a club that trades on substance rather than scenery, and that's no bad thing.
Wollaton Park's grand setting
Wollaton Park Golf Club is the county's one confirmed parkland course, and it makes full use of its surroundings. Laid out across 140 acres of Wollaton Park just three miles from Nottingham city centre, the course plays beneath the gaze of the 16th-century Wollaton Hall, with a large lake and free-roaming deer part of the everyday backdrop. Tom Williamson, one of the most prolific course architects of his era, designed the layout, which opened in 1927 with an exhibition featuring Harry Vardon and John Henry Taylor — the same duo whose names crop up at Bulwell Forest, a neat thread running through the city's golfing story. Wollaton Park has since hosted the Cox Moore tournament in the 1960s and the Forte PGA Seniors Championship in 1991, and its Wollaton Stag Scratch Open has run every year since 1967, giving the club a competitive tradition that stretches back generations. Parkland golf here means tree-lined fairways, mature planting, and a course that asks for accuracy over brute length, all set inside grounds that would be worth a walk even without the golf.
The rest of the city's golf
Nottingham City Golf Club rounds out the outdoor options within the city, giving members and visitors another 18-hole course without leaving the urban boundary. For those wanting to work on their game away from the weather, or fit in some practice around a working week, Bunker Indoor Golf in Nottingham offers a year-round alternative to the two main clubs — useful in a county where winter conditions can otherwise dictate what golf is possible.
Taken together, Nottingham's golf is compact and city-based rather than spread across a county the way some regions are. What stands out is the continuity: the same historic names appear at more than one club, the courses have proper competitive histories rather than being purely recreational, and the parkland setting at Wollaton Park in particular gives the county a course worth seeking out on its own merits, deer and Elizabethan hall included.