Alwoodley Golf Club - England

Alwoodley Golf Club is located five miles from the center of Leeds, an industrial city in Yorkshire in the north of England. The character of the course is defined by the Yorkshire moors, with the fairways stretching over Wigton Moor, which was part of Lord Harewood's estate. A small wood known as "Wigton Cover" flanks the back of the seventh green and runs alongside the eighth. Alwoodley has one of the most interesting architectural pedigrees of any course in England. When the club was founded in 1907, Harry Colt was hired for the design, but was asked to consult with the club's honorary secretary, a local physician named Dr. Alister MacKenzie, who had a keen interest in course design. MacKenzie, who went on to design Augusta National, Cypress Point, and Royal Melbourne, among others, took the lead, and his first design work already reflects his graceful, patterned bunkering and highly contoured greens. The course is a rich medley of colors with golden gorse in the spring, meadows of heather the color of plum pudding, and the deep auburns and reds of autumn leaves.

Woodhall Spa (Hotchkin Course) - England

Woodhall Spa is the exemplar of that particularly British genus of golf courses, the heathland links. Unlike the better-known seaside links of Scotland and England, Woodhall Spa is tucked away amidst the farmland of Lincolnshire in northern England. Its fairways are surrounded by fitilds of heather that burn like purple embers in the summer with accents of yellow gorse set against a layered backdrop of oak, fir, and silver birch. The Hotchkin Course takes its name from Stafford Hotchkin, or Col. S.Y. Hotchkin, who came to own Woodhall Spa in the 1920s. Hotchkin substantially redesigned the existing course that had originally been laid out by Harry Vardon in 1905 and revised by Harry Colt, creating the cavernous bunkers carved from the sandy soil for which the course is known. Woodhall Spa itself is a resort village that owes its existence to the discovery of mineral waters in the early 19th century. The resort flourished in the early 1900s, with guests coming for the "bromo-iodine" waters, golf, and the summer pastoral of woodlands and rhododendrons. The tower on the moor, the emblem of the village, dates from the 1440s and is located behind the third green. In 1995, the English Golf Union acquired Woodhall Spa, where it has its headquarters, and built a second course named The Bracken.