Golf
M
id‐Wales’ Welshpool Golf Club, maintained by two greenkeepers including Jonathan (Jon) Gamble, is high‐altitude, free‐draining
and features lots of four‐legged, woolly hazards.
And it shares a common feature with many hilly and dramatic golf courses found in the country’s higher regions: it has a signature final hole which requires an obscenely accurate tee shot.
The fairway travels almost horizontally, right‐to‐left, hundreds of feet below the tee box. To hit the front‐right takes a semi‐safe long iron.
But, to hit the middle and leave oneself with a makeable second, the golfer will need to hit a full‐powered drive and have it stop in a 30‐yard drop‐zone ‐ even before the dogleg complicates things.
The views are incredible from up around that 18th tee and include vague blurs of Mid‐Wales and Shropshire’s other finest mountain courses.
The course was designed by the iconic James Braid, and golf writer Bernard Darwin OBE was awed by its uniqueness of location and terrain, describing it thus [as sourced from the club’s website]:
“The fact is that it is almost as impossible to describe the course as to describe the view; it is so unexpected, so unlike anything else, perched on the roof of the world. It is a beautiful place and I realised how incomplete had been my golfing education until I had seen it.”
And the club isn’t only successful in its course design. Its staff have won notable awards in recent years too, including Jon having just been awarded an R&A greenkeeping scholarship.
Its stewardess has also been honoured with The Food Awards Wales 2018’s ‘Mid Wales Café/Bistro of the Year’. Perhaps most impressive of all, the club is the 2012 Welsh Golf Club of the Year.
The course is built on Moel Y Golfa (or Golfa Hill), the name of which is purely coincidental and not named after the sport, which dates to 1930 with the club having previously been nearby from 1894. This hill is part of an extinct volcanic area of prominence. The range of five hills in which it resides is the site of an iron age fortification and, like so many hills in central Wales, a quarry.
Like nearby Church Stretton, the UK’s second‐highest golf course (while the journey between the courses takes an indirect hour in the car, it is only 20km as the crow flies), Welshpool is a self‐described moorland course. And Welshpool itself isn’t
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