Royal St. David's Golf Club - Wales

Royal St. David's is located in Harlech on the Welsh coast. The course lies under the commanding gaze of Harlech Castle, a forbidding masterpiece of concentric fortification built beginning in 1283, during the reign of King Edward I, on the gray stone cliffs above the seaside plain that shelters the course. From the castle's battlements there is a bird's-eye view across the barrier dunes to the sweep of Tremadoc Bay and northeast to the mountains of Snowdonia, described by Patrie Dickinson as looking like "the serrated back of some vast ancient saurian monster, which changes color with every mood of the elements." The course had a whimsical beginning one day in 1893 when William Henry More, who would become the club's first secretary, spotted Harold Finch-Hatton, recently returned from Australia, throwing a boomerang on the "Morfa" or sheep-grazing plain below the castle. The two decided that the land would be perfect for a golf course and by the fall of 1894, 18 holes had been laid out. St. David's is a testing but not brutish course that flows through shallow dunes and meadowlands, finishing with a par three.