Pennard Golf Club West Glamorgan

Pennard Golf Club, located 8 miles west of Swansea in the Gower Peninsula, an area of outstanding natural beauty. Golf has been played there since 1896, although the course owes most of its appeal today first to James Braid and then to C.K. Cotton. The holes are routed over classically undulating and tumbling linksland, full of hummocks, hillocks and hollows and pocked with dunes large and small; in sum, exactly what we might hope to find beside the shore. Yet this exceptional terrain is not beside the shore – It is two hundred feet above it. No wonder Pennard has been called “the links in the sky.” There is not a weak or a prosaic hole on this short gorse and heather framed, 6,809 yard, par 71 track.

Daisies sprout in the fairways and bluebells and buttercups aboud in the long rough grasses, but spirited topography provides the first line of defence on this sublimely natural links. Awkward lies and stances are a matter of course and the rugged terrain becomes even more dramatic on the back nine. Beware also, the forty bunkers, which although not exceptionally large, are very well placed and sometimes lethal! Pennard’s most remarkable hole may be the 351 yard 7th, which heads out to sea from a high, noble tee. The line of flight between the sparse ruins of a 13th century church and more imposing remnants of Pennard Castle, which dates from the 1100’s, presents one unforgettable experience.

The rough on both sides of the fairway is almost inhumane and the green, hidden above in a cluster of sandhills, slopes sharply away from the pitch. Pennard is surely among the top twenty greatest courses in the world with a course that emphasizes shot values and the strategic considerations required supply golfing excitement of the highest order. And all in a setting of rare beauty and splendour!