Saunton Golf Club Devon

NICK FALDO MBE ‘Blown, buffeted and sometimes blasted by the wind’ … links golf, you either adore it or you avoid it like the plague. Many of my American friends seem to think that I grew up on a diet of links golf. Well, there aren’t too many sand dunes in Welwyn Garden City! The first links course I saw was Troon when, around the time of my 16th birthday, my father took me to the 1973 Open. I recall it being so cold that I walked the course wearing pyjamas beneath my trousers.

My first experience of playing a links course came the following year when I entered the West of England Stroke Play Amateur Championship at Saunton. I love links golf and, though I rarely get an opportunity to visit the West Country, I am a huge fan of Saunton. I’ve no doubt that if the East Course were located on the coast of Lancashire or Kent it would have hosted an Open Championship by now. Framed by magnificent sand hills, it is a classic links and one where the character of the terrain and the vagaries of a near ever-present wind combine to create a wonderfully absorbing challenge. I’m less familiar with the West Course but the landscape is perhaps even more spectacular and I cannot think of anywhere in England where 36 holes could be more enjoyable.