Best of Britain: South Wales

With the Ryder Cup being played there this week, it’s a big month for South Wales which boasts some of the best golf courses in the UK.

Here we check out six of the area’s best courses starting with Celtic Manor which of course stages the RC this weekend.

*1 Celtic Manor Twenty Ten Course

7,493 yards, par 71

There is something different about the Twenty Ten experience. For a start, right beside the sparkling new clubhouse and slap bang in the middle of resort owner Terry Matthews’ £40m Ryder Cup investment, is an ugly, dilapidated building. Matthews offered £300,000 to have the Grade II-listed eyesore removed and rebuilt, brick by brick, but the local council refused. Matthews called this “insane”, and he is right.

The next staller comes in the form of a rollercoaster three-minute buggy ride from the clubhouse, across a road and down a precipice, to the first tee. The Twenty Ten Course was built for the Ryder Cup, and this strange start is to allow for a tented village between the two. Things at last get more normal on the first tee, a powerful opener of some 450 yards, with fairway traps gulping greedily from the left.

The Twenty Ten course, a blend of nine new holes and nine restructured from the defunct Wentwood Hills layout, unfurls across the River Usk floodplain. And while the Usk Valley setting is spectacular, the pan-flat terrain is hardly what you’d call classic golf land.

So the Twenty Ten course is manufactured; yet to play the course is to gain a new respect for artifice. Like Pete Dye’s TPC at Sawgrass in Florida, a stunning layout dredged from a swamp, this is a course that confidently asserts that man, as well as nature, can create a fantastic golf challenge. Fairways rise up between lakes like legs in the bath; water laps up against greenside swales so aggressive in parts that even a quality, experienced player Paul Lawrie can card a try-on-every-shot 11 – on the 2nd at this year’s Wales Open; abrupt and unapologetic green contouring sets a series of insoluble putting puzzles. The Usk itself, one of the few natural hazards, only really makes an appearance along the left of the long 9th.

Meanwhile, holes glide by like catwalk supermodels – sinuous, serious, siren-seductive. Nor is there an ounce of flab on show: the Twenty Ten course gives you the feeling that every square yard is the product of a carefully-thought out strategy. Greenside contours are calibrated to deliver precise results, not always dry; fairways taper for a reason; traps get more penal the further you stray.

The course is long, but challenges brain as well as brawn. Decisions must be made on most tees, especially par-4s 5, 14 and the marmite-hole 15th, where you either plod around a sharp dogleg or cut the corner for the green. But your biggest decision is made before you start out, in choosing the right tees for your ability; the course is almost 1000 yards shorter off yellows.

One thing arguably letting the layout down is the five par-3s. While two of them  – numbers 3 and 13 – offer exciting water carries, all pretty much play in the same direction and measure the same sort of length – only 21 yards’ difference off the whites. 

The course finishes with three holes cut into the valley side, their theatre-like nature again reminding you of the influence of the Ryder Cup on design. In many ways the par-5 18th, with its perilous approach over a shaved bank, sums the course up – artificial, exacting, exciting.

You might not play the Twenty Ten course for a spiritual experience – but if you want to know how good a golfer you are, on an immaculate course – and get treated like royalty while you’re there – then you can’t do any better than this.

Vital statistics

Location: M4 junction 24, B4237 exit.

Contact: 01633 413000 Web: www.celtic-manor.com

Green fees: £175 (check web for deals)

*2 Marriott St Pierre Old Course

Par 71, 6,925 yards

Celtic Manor 2010 course designer Ross McMurray has also been at work on this parkland layout, building four new green complexes alongside 18 new tees and upgraded bunkers. But the dominating feature of this former European Tour venue remains the towering, tumultuous oaks and horse chestnuts that make straight driving utterly crucial and force the club to employ four full-time leaf clearers in the autumn.

The Old course develops like a movie, the plot building through the early high holes before exploding dramatically at the climax. The approaches to semi-island greens at 15 and 17 ask your shredded nerves for pinpoint accuracy – literally – while the uphill 240-yard par-3 18th  must be the only hole in golf capable of holding both a longest drive and nearest the pin competition at the same time.

There are some bare patches around, but almost always from green-to-tee – perhaps inevitable on a course that hosts 40,000 rounds a year. But Marriott St Pierre gets it right where it matters – both on and off the course.

Vital statistics

Location: M48 to junction 2, A466 to Chepstow, then A48 to Caerwent for 2 miles.
Contact: 01291 635205. Web: www.marriott.co.uk

Green fees: £50 all week; 2-Fore!-1 Mon-Fri.

*3 Rolls of Monmouth

Par 72, 6,733 yards

This early 1980s course is set in the extensive grounds of the Rolls family estate and the 18th century manor, long since vacated, dominates the site. Indeed Charles Stewart Rolls of Rolls-Royce fame pieced together his first engine in what is now the clubhouse.

The course starts a little slowly on the flatter ground, but the pace picks up as you enter the higher holes. The plunging par-5 7th, jagging right to a stream-crested green, sets you up for a breathtaking back nine in which the downill par-3 13th – green framed by water short and right and trees left – is just about perfection. With the crisp turf, forest and views west to the Brecon Beacons, this rivals Perthshire.

A long par-3 finale rounds off a fine 18 holes, with touches of real class. But the mostly empty manor, small membership and rather pokey off-course set-up leaves you feeling the place is a distance away from realising its massive potential. 

Vital statistics

Location: off the B4233, 10 minutes west of Monmouth.

Contact: 01600 715353. Web: www.therollsgolfclub.com

Green fees: (18 holes or day ticket) Mon-Fri £42; Sat-Sun £46.

*4 Southerndown

Par 70, 6,449 yards

This is a course you play with larksong in your ears, sea breeze in your nostrils and gorse prickles in your backside.

Southerndown is superbly draped across lofty downland covered in sand thrown up from Porthcawl Bay by ancient storms. The result is a curious and exhilirating mix of links and moorland scenery, with wind, gorse, pot bunkers and firm greens conspiring to throw you off the scent.

A fifth obstacle comes in the form of the hundreds of sheep that graze this common land; Southerndown has 400 greenstaff, but 394 are four-legged and woolly. They add a lot of character, but also a lot of poo – a fact not lost on me when my bump-and-run at the 4th is ruined by a bit of a fudgy bounce.

But this scarcely detracts from a wonderfully unspoilt and old-fashioned golfing experience; there are times out here when you can forget whether it’s 2010 or 1910.

Vital statistics

Location: off the B4524, three miles south of Bridgend.

Contact: 01656 881112. Web: www.southerndowngolfclub.com

Green fees: Mon-Fri £55 before noon, £45 after; Sat-Sun £75 before noon, £65 after.

 *5 Royal Porthcawl

Par 72, 7,065 yards

For many the best course in Wales, this authentic links was heading for the Open rota in the 1930s until WWII put paid to the plan. Even today, it’s hard to see what this recently extended layout lacks against the current rota crop.

The course appears to peak as early as the 2nd, a terrific two-shooter into the breeze curving gently left to a beachside green – but as the round moves on you begin to realise this sort of quality is more the rule than the exception. Penal tee shots give way to dramatic approaches to greens well-guarded by black-hole pot traps that suck in anything in their vicinity. At every moment the sea dominates your peripheral vision, courtesy of the dune-free landscape.

Especially memorable are the Postage Stamp-esque 7th, a wedge flick to a green just nine paces wide, and the drive from the elevated 10th tee, which takes you straight towards the coast. But the quality never relents; I asked six members for their favourite hole and got six different answers, and that sums up Royal Porthcawl.

Vital statistics

Location: M4 ju37, then follow A4229 through Porthcawl.

Contact: 01656 773702. Web: www.royalporthcawl.com

Green fees: Mon-Fri (inc 2-course lunch) £98 round, £143 day; Sat-Sun £120 round, £175 day.

*6 Wales National Course, The Vale

Par 73, 7,433 yards

Sprawling across 200 acres of rolling Glamorganshire terrain, Wales National course is a fun and challenging mix of trees, water, sand and above all length. It’s a message that hits home pretty early on; the par-5 2nd, measuring over 600 yards from the tips, asks you to slide two shots through a very narrow channel – before negotiating water before the green. The five water features on the course come into play on no fewer than nine holes.

The course blends the need for power with course management – the driveable par-4 6th is fraught with danger, and some thought on the tees at 1 and 17 can see you cut the corner. But the amazing 16th  transports you from Arizona to St Andrews in a few short steps, a vast, flat sandy trap ending at a green 60 yards wide and full of crazy humps.

The course and host venue, The Vale, are favourite haunts of the Welsh National rugby team; It’s not hard to see why.

Vital statistics

Location: M4 ju34, then follow signs for Hensol and Vale Hotel.

Contact: 01443 667800. Web: www.vale-hotel.com/golf

Green fees: Current promotion Mon-Weds £25; Thurs-Sun £30 2-Fore!-1 on standard £70 fee only.

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And here’s six 2-FORE!-1 stars where you can enjoy half-price green fees with a 2-FORE!-1 voucher.

*Alice Springs G&LC

*Cottrell Park

*Morlais Castle

*Neath

*St Mellons

*Wenvoe Castle