A county shaped by fells, valleys and shoreline
Westmorland and Furness packs a surprising amount of variety into seventeen clubs. The mix leans heavily towards parkland, eight courses in all, with three links tracks along the coast and estuaries and two moorland layouts up in the hills. That spread reflects the landscape itself: Lake District uplands giving way to the Lune and Eden valleys, then down to the tidal flats of Morecambe Bay and the Duddon and Furness coastline. You can play three quite different types of golf within a short drive of each other, which is not something every English county can claim.
The parkland courses cluster around Kendal, Penrith, Sedbergh and Kirkby Lonsdale, mostly sitting in river valleys with tree-lined fairways and fell views rather than flat, manicured monotony. Grange-over-Sands has two contrasting clubs of its own, one parkland and one moorland, within walking distance of each other, while Keswick sits under Blencathra and Skiddaw with water features running through rolling terrain.
Pedigree design and genuine golfing history
The design credits here are unusually strong for a county of this size. Grange Over Sands Golf Club, laid out in the 1920s, was designed by Dr Alister MacKenzie and still plays over level fairways with USPGA standard greens. Ulverston, overlooking Morecambe Bay and the Lakeland fells, was designed by H.S. Colt. Appleby, a links course set on the sandstone and heather of Brackenber Moor, came from Willie Fernie in 1894 and remains free-draining and playable year-round, a course good enough to host County Championship matches and currently ranked 94th in England.
Furness Golf Club, on Walney Island, is the county's real historical heavyweight. Founded in 1872 by migrant Scottish workers from Dundee as a six-hole course, it's the third oldest links course and sixth oldest golf course in England, and Harry Vardon himself opened the present layout on 8th January 1916. On a clear day you can see the Isle of Man from the fairways, alongside views across Morecambe Bay and the Irish Sea. Nearby, The Dunnerholme Golf Club at Askam in Furness has been laid out on the Duddon Estuary shoreline for more than 120 years, its ten greens serving eighteen individual tees so the back nine plays as a genuinely different course from the front.
Height, moorland and a properly odd curiosity
Up at Alston, the golf club sits within the North Pennines Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty at 1,476 feet above sea level, making it the highest golf course in England. It's a ten-hole layout using eighteen tee positions to make a full round, and the club doubles as a stargazing venue thanks to dark skies clear enough to pick out the Milky Way. Kendal's moorland course, by contrast, uses limestone drainage to stay playable year-round despite blind shots and elevation changes across its terrain, with a par-3 named Battleships as its signature hole. Grange Fell, above Grange-over-Sands, is a nine-hole moorland course played as eighteen, with panoramic views of Ingleborough, Morecambe Bay and the Lake District fells that are often rated among the finest in Britain.
Getting out to play
Green fees start from as little as £10 in the county, and Penrith Golf Hub even offers par-3 membership from £4 a week, so there's little financial barrier to sampling the variety on offer. Kirkby Lonsdale, within the Yorkshire Dales National Park, is one of the newer additions, opened in 1991 with two anti-clockwise nine-hole loops crossing Barbon Beck and the River Lune. Sedbergh, founded in 1896, has both the River Dee and River Rawthey running through it. Between the valley parkland, the moorland heights and the links along the Furness coast, this is a county where the golf changes character every few miles, and where courses like Appleby and Kendal prove that limestone and sandstone bedrock keep play going through a Cumbrian winter better than you might expect.