A parkland county with real pedigree
Stockport is not a large county for golf, but it punches well above its size. Thirteen clubs sit within or around the town, and ten of them are parkland courses, giving the borough a consistent character: tree-lined fairways, mature landscaping, and courses that reward accuracy over brute force. The one outlier is Mellor Golf Club, a moorland course set in an elevated position with views over five counties — a proper change of scenery if you tire of parkland golf, and reputedly a spot John Wesley visited back in 1745.
What lifts Stockport above a lot of comparable areas is the design lineage running through it. Alister MacKenzie worked on both Bramall Park, redesigning the course in 1921 before James Braid made further improvements in 1934, and Reddish Vale, which he laid out in 1912 in an urban setting hemmed in by the M60. Reddish Vale was rated 10th best in Cheshire in August 2023 and sits in the top 200 courses in England, which is a serious achievement for a course squeezed into a built-up corridor five miles from Manchester city centre. The two MacKenzie courses are now linked as part of the Cavendish Mackenzie Trail, worth doing as a pair if you want to see how one architect's ideas play out on different sites.
Stockport town and its older clubs
Most of the county's golf is concentrated in Stockport itself. Stockport Golf Club, founded in 1905 and designed by Sandy Herd, has hosted genuine history — a 1929 Ryder Cup exhibition match featuring Gene Sarazen and Walter Hagen — and still runs Open Regional Qualifying and county championships on its rural, woodland-fringed layout near the Derbyshire border. Cheadle Golf Club, founded in 1885, claims the title of oldest 9-hole club in Cheshire, while Heaton Moor, dating from 1892, sits in a conservation area and belongs to the 1892 Club network, giving members reciprocal golf at historic clubs elsewhere in the country.
Romiley, founded in 1897 and redesigned by Tom Renouf in 1924, was originally known as Woodley and Romiley Golf Club until 1908, and its tree-lined fairways look out towards the foothills of the Peak District. Marple, also founded in 1892, offers flat parkland golf with an unexpected reward: views across to the Manchester city centre skyline from several holes. Hazel Grove, founded in 1913, rolls across the Cheshire plains with USGA-spec greens and water hazards to catch the unwary, and similar water challenges define Houldsworth in Reddish, where Dave Thomas's 1910 design builds to an