GOLF


Ramside Golf Club


Relationship building!


Ramside Golf Club in County Durham comprises two 18-hole courses, but it wasn’t always that way. Tucked away in the middle of the older Prince Bishop Course are the greenkeepers’ sheds, which is where Lee Williams met up with brothers-in-law Roger Shaw and Craig Hardy to discover more about the young history of the club


F


or brothers-in-law Roger Shaw and Craig Hardy, working at Ramside Golf Club has been a family affair for the last twenty-six years. Their working association began in 1994 with the construction of the original twenty- seven-hole project - the Prince Bishop course - a nine hole Cathedral Course and also a sixteen bay driving range. The duo talk me through how their journey in the industry began. “I started my greenkeeping apprenticeship in 1973 at Billingham Golf Course,” began Roger. “Then, in 1976, I went to Darlington Golf Club as Head Greenkeeper working alongside the old course manager who was in ill health. After a year, I was asked to take over as course manager. Then, ten years


later, I was asked to apply for the job at Brancepeth Castle Golf Club, where I spent another ten years.”


“Then the dream of the owner of Ramside Hall Hotel, Michael Adamson (who sadly passed away in 2010, at the age of seventy- four), was to build a golf course around the hotel. As I had known Michael since being a kid in my hometown of Sedgefield, I approached him to see what his plans were. Cutting a long story short, we had a really good conversation at his house one evening. He was totally lost and being bombarded by people in the industry wanting to come in and design and build the course. I told him I was potentially looking for a development to get stuck into and suggested that I could build his golf course and stay on and


28


PC April/May 2020


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