Municipal Magic at Clandon Golf

I took a trip home this week for some respite, rejuvenation and some much needed sleep. Of course, in practice, this means travelling home with a duffel bag and my golf clubs, for an adventure on links land further south, toward home. A particular favourite of mine is a local municipal course near Guildford, where I play regularly when I’m back home and where I think the essence of the game is most certainly found.

Nestled in the lowland of the Surrey Hills a stones throw from Guildford and Clandon park, Clandon Golf might be the best value play we’ve ever found. Twilight times year round will set you back £17 for a full circuit. A bargain of the highest caliber. This public track seems both novice and unspectacular from the car park overlooking the temporary, understated clubhouse, if you could even call it that. It’s more of an outhouse with a desk. But don’t be fooled by these initial impressions, for the course plays both difficult and rewarding for a plethora of reasons at different points in the golfing year. In the winter, the soft greens and muddy rough can ruin an approach shot with errant flight or ‘de-greened’ nippers, and in the summer, the hard fairways and burnt greens make stopping the ball an impossible challenge. 

It has both satisfying length and gettable opportunity, in what we’d consider a perfect harmony. The course doesn’t have some wondrous designer with a utopian vision for what golf should be. Instead, it lets you decide for yourself. Stroke-play will leave you bereft of energy following your toils to make birdies on supposedly ‘easy’ holes, and match-play will leave you just as exhausted with the rollercoaster ride of lucky breaks, un-makable putts and tough lies you surely would’ve encounter. It is an ideal setting for approachable golf, both in its culture and layout.

Despite this, however, its design has a simple charm that can’t really be described. It isn’t obvious nor hidden, it’s just there. It’s there for you to engage with and for you to help dictate. A handful of the holes play like traditional British parkland, whereas others have a Scottishness about them. The mixture is brilliant, diverse and never short of exclamation. The plot of land has only been a golf course for a decade and a half. Beforehand, it was a quarry that traded on the export of chalk. The chalk-based soil makes the course drain superbly well, and the fairways have a Links style density that is found nowhere else nearby, save the Surrey sand-belt. When I’m home from university, it’s like an impression of home; an impression of Scotland. Divots are clean and wide, have a natural squareness to them and leave sand in the grooves of your irons. It’s the way it should be. It’s the Eden way.

This time around, I played the course with my older brother James, who has recently picked up the game (and the obsession that follows along) over the last two years. In retrospect, I gave him too many strokes for this most recent battle, but in past conquests, our matches have been filled with all the drama you dream of when scheming up a friendly battle on the course. It didn’t disappoint. It never does.

If you find yourself in the area, with a spare few hours and a handful of change, go and check it out. It’s one of my favourites, and will continue to be for the foreseeable future. 

Written and shot by Ed Chambler, with special thanks to James Chambler for the camera work and exceptional company.

P.S, A trip to Clandon Golf is complete without driving to the Queens Head, just 2 minutes down the road, for a quenching pint of Shere Drop.