Somerset's twenty clubs cover a surprising amount of ground for a county best known for cider orchards and the Levels. The list runs from championship links tucked against the Bristol Channel to parkland courses laid out beneath the Quantocks, with a downs course and a coastal nine-holer thrown in for good measure. Green fees start from £25, which keeps the county accessible even where the golf gets serious.
Links golf on the north coast
The obvious starting point is Burnham & Berrow, founded in 1890 and set among the dunes at Burnham-on-Sea. It's ranked 29th in Great Britain and Ireland by Golf Monthly and sits first in Somerset on Top100GolfCourses.com, and it hosts The Open Qualifying Series Final, which tells you everything about the standard of test on offer. A few miles up the coast at Minehead, Minehead & West Somerset claims to be Somerset's oldest golf club, also founded in 1882, and its links is played on the same ground it started on, backed by views of the Brendon Hills across the Bristol Channel. It hosted the 2024 Somerset County Championship and regularly stages PGA and regional events. For something shorter and less exacting, Brean Golf Club offers a nine-hole coastal course near Burnham-on-Sea with 18 tees, water hazards and smaller greens buffeted by sea breezes — a good warm-up or wind-down to a day on the bigger links nearby.
Parkland across the Levels and the hills
Parkland is comfortably the dominant course type here, with twelve of the twenty clubs falling into that category, and the variety within it is worth noting. Enmore Park, near Bridgwater, sits in the Quantock Hills with views stretching across the Bristol Channel to Wales, and its brook feeding three ponds comes into play on five holes. Isle of Wedmore, opened in 1992, looks out over the Mendip Hills, Cheddar Valley and Glastonbury Tor and was built with an eye on the surrounding landscape rather than against it. Orchardleigh, near Frome, was designed by Ryder Cup captain Brian Huggett and was named South West England Golf Club of the Year in 2023, with water in play on seven holes. In Taunton, three very different parkland options sit close together: Taunton & Pickeridge, founded in 1892 and the area's only private members' club, with panoramic views across the Levels; Vivary Park, designed by W H Fowler in 1928 and laid out within walking distance of the town centre on flat, easy ground; and Oake Manor, between the Quantock, Brendon and Blackdown hills, where water threatens ten of the eighteen holes. Further south, Long Sutton at Langport was designed by Patrick Dawson across 130 acres of the South Somerset Levels, while Cricket St Thomas, near Chard, pairs its parkland layout with a Top Tracer driving range and reciprocal arrangements with other South West clubs.
The Mendips, and the smaller courses
Somerset's one downs course, Mendip Golf Club at Radstock, dates from 1908 and sits in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty with views across the Vale of Avalon. It was ranked the county's fourth-best course in 2019, hosted that year's Somerset County Championships, and was chosen for the European Junior Golf Tour in 2020 — a serious pedigree for a club playing over downland turf rather than the parkland found almost everywhere else in the county. Elsewhere, the nine-hole clubs add character rather than length: Wincanton doubles its nine holes into an eighteen-hole round inside the town's racecourse, closing on racedays, while Kingweston, on the Millfield School campus, plays over flat ground with narrow fairways and small greens on a nine-green routing. Cannington Golf Centre, designed by Martin Hawtree with USGA-standard greens, gives the Bridgwater area a course built to a genuinely international specification despite its modest nine holes.
Getting around
With clubs spread from Frome in the east to Minehead in the west, and Bristol, Bridgwater and Somerton filling in the middle, a short trip through Somerset can take in links, downs and several distinct styles of parkland without much driving between rounds.