Berkshire (Blue)
Ascot, England
- AddressSwinley Rd, Winkfield Row, Ascot SL5 8AY, UK
Sunningdale, Wentworth and Walton Heath are the only clubs in England other than the Berkshire Golf Club that can boast about having two heathland golf courses positioned in the English Top 100. It’s surprising that so few people know how charming the Berkshire experience really is.
The Blue course is the Red’s more conventional and slightly shorter sister. A more standard four par 3s, three par 5s and eleven par 4s make up the configuration for this delightful par 71 course. In Bernard Darwin’s book, Golf Between Two Wars, he wrote: “The other, the Blue, which some people prefer, a little less ‘big’, but by no means a secondary course. The country is essentially undulating and interesting and full of natural beauty…The Berkshire courses have more of charm perhaps and less of austere grandeur than Walton Heath.”
Herbert Fowler was the Berkshire’s architect and the Blue course opened for play in 1928. Fowler was actually very good at designing excellent twin golf courses. Not only did Fowler design both courses here at the Berkshire, but he also designed the highly-regarded, intertwined courses at Walton Heath, the Old and the New.
Both the Berkshire courses have the same natural hazards, although the Blue plays over flatter ground than the Red. Cruelly, the Blue opens up with an exceptionally tough par 3, with the tee directly in front of the clubhouse window. The green sits on a distant plateau. Not the easiest hole on which to start a round of golf – play the Red course in the morning to prepare for it!
There are many other notable holes on the Blue course but it’s the closing sequence of five holes that makes this a tough but special course. All five are par 4s and three of them are more than 400 yards long. It could be argued that the Blue has a similar but less acute weakness than her brother the Red – the three par 5s on the Blue course are very short indeed, the longest measures only 477 yards.
However, short par fives aside, the Berkshire is the most delightful place to play 36 holes of golf, perhaps only surpassed by the pairing of Sunningdale’s Old and New courses.
Following a historic review of The Berkshire courses in collaboration with Adam Lawrence of Oxford Golf Consulting, architect Tim Lobb’s design firm commenced a programme of bunker and landscape restoration on both the Red and Blue layouts in 2016 and this work is ongoing.
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Herbert Fowler was introduced to golf at Royal North Devon when visiting nearby Bideford on banking business in 1879 and he became a club member, winning the Prince of Wales Medal two years later.
