Woburn Golf Club

Played 29th May 2025

Disclaimer: due to kid schedules I was only able to fit in 11 holes, so the review is solely based on that

I personally find parkland courses a tough thing to do well, simply because majority of the time it just lends itself to a quite monotonous backdrop/vistas, which means there is not much to work with visually to make holes individually memorable. And aside from a couple of key holes, I found this with Woburn. There was nothing wrong per se, but even a few days later I found it hard to visualize my round in my head, which to me has always been the key hall mark of a great course. The problem is every hole seems to be some sort of dogleg with trees either side, which means the bulk of your focus is on making sure you don’t end up in them, which sort of steals any focus you could spend on appreciating the more minute details of each hole.

That being said, the 7th par 5 certainly was attention grabbing, and I am not sure I have taken more photographs on an individual hole before. Visually off the tee it greets you with a slightly different aesthetic than anything you have seen leading up to that point, with individual trees being highlighted both in the middle of the fairway as well as around the edges, and a little visual clearing of trees off in the distance where the green sits. In between you and the green features a split fairway, offering a wide landing zone to the right but if you carry >225 yards it runs down an extremely steep hill into a zone best avoided. The other option is to go left into what looks quite a narrow landing zone but with much more run out. It is only once you are halfway down the fairway you realize that the narrowness of the left side was somewhat of an optical illusion, and there is actually much more space than you think, making it certainly the right choice (especially as I drove over the edge of the right hand side precipice an faced an extreme downhill lie for my second shot to get back into a better position. I think the hole is just about short of being labelled gimmicky, and I am sure some people might say it is, but to me it brought a level of excitement both visually and strategically that I had been missing up to that point, and that I wouldn’t really feel again that day.

Overall, it’s a very nice course with great condition, and if you are visiting the local Centerparcs then it would be foolish not to go play (and you might catch a sighting of Dan Grieves like I did at the halfway house), but would I travel 2 hours from London to play it again? Definitely not.