Shooter McPowick
Head Pro
There’s a photograph in the lounge from April 1990 showing the land that JCB has been built on. It’s farm fields growing crops. To have come from this to what it is today is quite inspiring, needless to say a lot of earth was moved around to create the course but it took some vision from Robin Hiseman to come up with this.
It opened in 2018, this course is only six years old yet it feels like it’s been there for considerably longer. There’s no history only that it’s come from fields, in time that will change.
It’s a brute, but is it fair? 7308 yards off the championship tees, we played off the whites at 7041 yards. There are two 600 yard par fives and two 450 yard + par fours that felt extraordinarily long as they played into a 25mph wind. It’s a course that you need to plot your way around, despite being long the only way to score here is to be strategic and accurate - but then this was the brief given to Robin.
There’s a few of the longer holes that do have options of the tee, the par 5 13th at 606 yards!! can be played with a long carry over water to cut the corner if you have the muscle or you can bail out to the right and it then becomes considerably longer, but a strategic three shotter. While it didn’t feel fair at the time, it is. It’s the kind of course you need to play a second time fairly soon after so that you know where and where not to go.
It was hard to fault the playing surfaces. Although greens maintenance was carried out immediately after LIV Golf’s UK event, the greens were still pretty good, although understandably slow. What stood out to me the most was the bunkering, there’s an awful lot of them and they were all in exceptionally good condition. The sand was soft and fluffy even though we had some rain during the round, importantly, there was plenty of it. When shuffling your feet you could feel there was a lot of sand underneath you.
I can’t deny it being a great experience and I can’t deny that it’s a good Golf Course. Would I go back if invited? Of course I would. Hospitality was exceptional but I’m afraid it’s just not my kind of golf course. Had it been played on a warm sunny day you could be mistaken for thinking you were in the Algarve or Florida Keys. With all due respect and by no means do I mean this in a negative way, it just felt like you were abroad. Perhaps that’s a good thing for some, but for me, it’s not English Golf.
It opened in 2018, this course is only six years old yet it feels like it’s been there for considerably longer. There’s no history only that it’s come from fields, in time that will change.
It’s a brute, but is it fair? 7308 yards off the championship tees, we played off the whites at 7041 yards. There are two 600 yard par fives and two 450 yard + par fours that felt extraordinarily long as they played into a 25mph wind. It’s a course that you need to plot your way around, despite being long the only way to score here is to be strategic and accurate - but then this was the brief given to Robin.
There’s a few of the longer holes that do have options of the tee, the par 5 13th at 606 yards!! can be played with a long carry over water to cut the corner if you have the muscle or you can bail out to the right and it then becomes considerably longer, but a strategic three shotter. While it didn’t feel fair at the time, it is. It’s the kind of course you need to play a second time fairly soon after so that you know where and where not to go.
It was hard to fault the playing surfaces. Although greens maintenance was carried out immediately after LIV Golf’s UK event, the greens were still pretty good, although understandably slow. What stood out to me the most was the bunkering, there’s an awful lot of them and they were all in exceptionally good condition. The sand was soft and fluffy even though we had some rain during the round, importantly, there was plenty of it. When shuffling your feet you could feel there was a lot of sand underneath you.
I can’t deny it being a great experience and I can’t deny that it’s a good Golf Course. Would I go back if invited? Of course I would. Hospitality was exceptional but I’m afraid it’s just not my kind of golf course. Had it been played on a warm sunny day you could be mistaken for thinking you were in the Algarve or Florida Keys. With all due respect and by no means do I mean this in a negative way, it just felt like you were abroad. Perhaps that’s a good thing for some, but for me, it’s not English Golf.
