65 Illenis erume sitatatur maio int maxim alitiis dolor atquatium que vit exeria paritio reiuntia vellest, sequissit voluptis int, alit The heathland of Surrey and Berkshire in southern England is an area of crucial importance to golf history. Essentially the region in which golf architecture came into existence as a discipline, the heath was the first place in which great golf was built in quantity away from the seaside. Harry Colt, Herbert Fowler, Tom Simpson and many others came to golf design here. The first club formed on the Surrey heath was the nine-hole Limpsfield Chart GC, which was founded in 1889. The second, though, was Woking. Bernard Darwin, in his classic The Golf Courses of the British Isles, published in 1910, suggested that the historian of London-area golf in the last years of the nineteenth century “might have dismissed in a line or two a course that a few mad barristers were trying to carve by main force out of a swamp thickly covered with gorse and heather near Woking.” But it was after Darwin’s hypothetical historian that Woking came to achieve its fame. Originally laid out by Tom Dunn in 1893 – and we should note that Dunn’s excellent routing mostly survives to this day – it was Woking members John Low and Stuart Paton (Paton was christened ‘the Mussolini of Woking’ by his friend Darwin, so powerful was he in the club) who, in the early years of the twentieth century transformed the course, turning it into a living experiment for Low’s theory of strategic golf. Most famous of Low and Paton’s innovations is the central bunker complex on the short par-four fourth hole, said by many to be the true birthplace of strategic design. But the two of them left virtually no part of the course untouched. Most noticeably, over a period of some forty years, Paton oversaw the recontouring of Dunn’s original greens to produce a set that remains one of the outstanding collections in British golf. While largely at natural grade (Harry Colt’s introduction of mostly raised greens Heather is flourishing on the par-four eleventh at Woking “ Most famous of Low and Paton’s innovations is the central bunker complex on the short par-four fourth” Photo: Jason Livy
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