A Golf Course Review of Kington Golf Course

To many golfers, especially the more mature among us, the very thought of playing a round at 1284 feet above sea level, on the highest golf course in England, can be stroke-inducing.
Yet these fears are groundless: all right it’s a haul up to the club from the town below but you’re in a car then! Once on the course it’s a gentle and gradual climb up the first and a short pull up to the fourth, otherwise the course is mostly on a plateau.
The club was founded in 1925 and is a fine natural links course with fast and true greens. Many visitors claim that they are the best greens in the Midlands (personally, I think those at Ludlow have the edge). Cynics would say that they should be, because the ground staff have little else to tend, with the sheep ensuring that the fairways never need mowing and that the grass grows well!
The fairways are wide but woe betide anyone who misses them for waiting expectantly on every hole are giant clumps of gorse and thick and welcoming bracken. There is a bit of semi rough here and there but basically a couple of feet off the fairway and you can often lose your ball or at best have to take a drop.
The fairways are very undulating, so for those golfers used to nice flat parkland courses, having to manufacture shots with the ball nestling in a little hollow or teetering on a bare down slope, can be intimidating yet challenging.
Kington is a short course of some 5625 yards off the yellows but both the 4th and the 8th are long, difficult par fours, which will test even the best of golfers. The 8th or 'Hill Top’ is the highest point of the course with a view over seven counties and a 360 degree uninterrupted view of the horizon. Spectacular.
From almost anywhere on the course are breath-taking panoramic views of The Black Mountains, The Brecon Beacons and the wilderness which is The Radnor Forest (it’s not a forest in the usual sense, but in the medieval one of "forest" being an unenclosed area used for hunting; a land of hill farming and great moorlands, with steep narrow valleys.
Add to that the wildlife and even if the golf is not going well there is still plenty to see and hear: a plethora of most attractive sheep (well, so I’m told by the large Celtic membership); numerous melodious skylarks, the ubiquitous buzzards and kestrels and the occasional red kite and so, the ground staff claim, a pair of merlins.
And if that isn’t enough two or three times each month members are entertained by a fly past of three great lumbering Hercules transports which, literally, fly below the higher holes as they follow the valley below. Wasn’t it one of P G Wodehouse’s characters who claimed that ‘the uproar of the butterflies in the adjoining meadows’ was destroying his game? Well at Kington, the approach of a Hercules from below can also be pretty daunting especially if one is attempting a tricky four footer.
I shall always remember meeting up in the clubhouse with an American couple who were walking Offa’s Dyke (which crosses the 1st and 18th holes). After the husband had listened to a couple of gin-soaked seniors waxing lyrical about the course and the views, he became so entranced that he left his bemused wife to continue the 15 mile walk to Knighton while he borrowed clubs and played the full 18. Several hours and many pints later he hired a taxi to rejoin his beloved in Knighton. I often wonder what sort of evening they had together – probably the last!