Huntercombe Golf Club

The rules at Huntercombe Golf Club in Oxfordshire:

• No tee times
• We are delighted to welcome visitors throughout the year, but you will have to forgive our idiosyncrasies. We like to keep play moving and are essentially a 2-ball course
• No four balls
• Lunch, no dinner
• In the dining room gentlemen should wear a jacket and tie

Well, well, well. A proper English golf club, playing the game in the proper way. Huntercombe has long been on my bucket list and I am thrilled to have finally played it.

Maidstone, the Old Course at Sunningdale, Huntercombe. All the work of Willie Park, Jr., one of my favorite designers. Park was the Open Champion in 1887 at Prestwick and again in 1889 at Musselburgh. He was the first person to pursue golf course architecture as a profession, designing 160 courses in total. Huntercombe was not only a golf course he designed, it was also his baby, so to speak. An aspiring businessman as well as an architect, he purchased the 724 acre Huntercombe Manor in 1900 and set out to develop it as the Chiltern Estates, which was to include a 100 bedroom hotel.

In an advertisement for Huntercombe, Park described the club as "A perfect seaside course, Inland. Grand old turf, gravel and sand subsoil, health-giving breezes, an ideal course for London golfers." As an added enticement to get men in the City to join the club arranged "motor cars," to meet the 9:50 am and 6:30 pm trains from Paddington Station when they arrived at Henley. Since my health hasn't been great over the last few years I particularly looked forward to playing Huntercombe for those health-giving breezes!

Park's business acumen was lacking and in 1924, the club, having financial difficulties, was sold to William Morris, Lord Nuffield, founder of the Morris Motor Car Company, whom the club has previously declined to admit as a member (awkward). He owned and ran the club until shortly before his death in 1963, selling it to the members for £1. Nuffield was wildly successful and philanthropic, establishing Nuffield College at Oxford in 1937. The Chiltern Estates and 100 bedroom hotel were never built, leaving Huntercombe in a delightfully rural environment.

The quintessential English home of Lord Nuffield in Oxfordshire

Huntercombe is located in Henley-on-Thames in the tony county of Oxfordshire. Henley-on-Thames is the site of the most famous regatta in the world, the Henley Royal Regatta, a rowing version of Royal Ascot, and an occasion, with well dressed patrons decked out in their best finery and hats.

Huntercombe has views of the Chiltern Hills, which doesn't mean much to most of us. The Chiltern Hills are designated by the British Government as an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, which is an apt description. Think quintessential rolling English countryside, with farm fields dotted with hedge rows. Below is an image of Huntercombe's fourth green as seen from a drone, with the Chiltern Hills in the distance. Pretty enticing.

Photo credit: Hutercombe Golf Club's Twitter feed

The 1st green at Huntercombe

The first three holes at Huntercombe are set apart from the remaining fifteen. The first three play just away from the clubhouse and run down and then up a steep hill. The remaining fifteen holes play on a different piece of topography and are flat. The first, a par three, starts with a large two-tiered green, which sets the tone for the day regarding the putting surfaces. Although the hole is only 142 yards long, from the tee you can see the pin flag but not the hole.

The course starts on a par three not by design, but because when the new clubhouse was built it was near this hole. The original starting hole is today's fourteenth, which was adjacent to the original clubhouse, Huntercombe Manor, which is still there today and is a private residence.  Huntercombe is one of the few courses I am aware of that plays shorter today than when it opened. The course opened at 6,500 yards and today plays as 6,319 yards; holes two, three, five, six, and eleven having been shortened.

The second at Huntercombe, a difficult par four, sweeps down a broad hill

The second hole, a par four of 416 yards, plays down a broad hill with a dramatic drop in elevation from an elevated tee. The hole also slopes right to left with out of bounds on the left. It is difficult to describe how far right you have to hit the ball off the tee in order to have it run down the hill a bit. On the day I played the conditions were fast and firm to say the least, and any ball hit on the fairway ended up running down to the left in a collection area, taking all the strategy out of playing the hole. I imagine in more normal conditions the design brings more risk-reward into play.

The zany, two-tiered third green

After walking through a stand of trees you stumble upon the third hole, a par four of 368 yards that plays much longer, climbing the same steep terrain you just descended. A mirror opposite of the second, any ball hit to the right side of the fairway on this hole will run down the hill to collection areas on the left. The green is tucked into the side of the top of the hill on the left and features another dramatic two tiered green.

Hmm . . . three holes and three two-tiered greens. I am not that bright but I'm spotting a trend here.

Grass hazard short of the 4th green on the right side at Huntercombe

The fourth hole is a relatively easy one that plays 331 yards downhill. It is also the golfer's true introduction to the hazards of the golf course. Huntercombe only has 13 sand bunkers, but has scores and scores of grass bunkers, or as the course calls them, "Pots." They are big, sometimes unsettlingly deep ditches and hollows without sand and they can prove a surprisingly effective hazard.

Huntercombe's 4th green

Huntercombe 4th green, like the first three, is multi-tiered and features a pronounced depression in it as seen above.

This grass bunker guards the left side of the 4th green

A large grass hazard guards the sixth hole approach 

As you can see from the image above, course conditions were not optimal when I played in September 2022, after a long and persistent drought. While greens and tee boxes were in excellent condition from an irrigation system, fairways and grass hazards were in a tough state, something I had to look past all day long to appreciate the beauty and uniqueness of Huntercombe's design.

The testing par-3 7th hole at Huntercombe

The seventh, the second par three on the front nine, a whopping 213 yards, is a real tester, not only because of its length but also because of the large mounding that protects the entrance to the putting surface.

People make pilgrimages from around the world to see the 8th hole, with its large, multi-tiered putting surface. A par four of 427 yards, it is the #1 stroke index hole. It helps to remember that this green was built in 1900 and Park's influence as a designer meant that greens such as this would be copied by designers such as Charles Blair Macdonald (who modeled a hole at the National Golf Links after a hole at Park's Sunningdale), and even modern day designers such as Pete Dye and Tom Doak.

A broad view of the 8th green at Huntercombe

This close-up of the 8th green shows some of the dramatic sloping

The back tier, where the pin is placed here, is by far the smallest surface area of the green.

The 14th green at Huntercombe is a sort of punch bowl style and surrounded by low mounding

The 16th, a par five, features one of the deepest grass bunkers on the course. A bomb crater bunker.

The seventeenth was my favorite hole on the course but I wasn't able to get any good pictures of it. It is a 274 yard ball-busting risk-reward par four similar in playing style to the 17th at National Golf Links, one of my favorite holes in the world. It is full of very effective grass bunkers and plays to a well protected push up green, with several of the courses scant sand bunkers used as protection. I made a double bogey on it unfortunately.

Ian Fleming was a member of Huntercombe and as such he tells us that James Bond played his golf “on courses around London – Huntercombe, Swinley, Sunningdale, the Berkshire. At the start of their famous golf match, Bond tells Goldfinger that he played off 9 at Huntercombe, which was Fleming's handicap. Fleming is my kind of golfer and used to play on Sunday mornings at 8:00am with a partner, and they were always done in under two hours. 

The course remains popular among members of Parliament and high ranking government officials. The one-time head of MI6, Sir David Spedding, was a member of Huntercombe. While having lunch in the intentionally modest clubhouse I noticed a Marshal of the Air Force's name up on one of the club championship boards. The club's ambiance and culture is one befitting high profile people in search of peace, quiet, and discretion. Early golf course architects J .F Abercromby and C. H. Alison were members, as was the famed golf writer Henry Longhurst.

It was nice to finally visit Huntercombe and see the historic course with its crazy greens, grass hazards and proper English setting. It's too bad I hit it in sub-optimal conditions, which only means I have to come back someday when the grass is lush. I'm sure the club won't mind as long as I don't show up as a four ball!