Blackmoor

Harry Colt produced a body of work across British golf that is remarkable for its consistency of quality, and yet within that body of work there are courses that have never received the attention they deserve. Blackmoor is among the most notable of these. The routing is a quiet demonstration of Colt's central principle: that a great golf course should use the land it occupies rather than work against it. The holes at Blackmoor flow through the pine and birch woodland with a naturalness that belies the considerable craft involved in their design, and the strategic interest is maintained throughout without resorting to artificial difficulty.

The course's relative obscurity is partly a function of its location. East Hampshire does not attract the same volume of golf tourism as the Surrey heathland belt to the north or the links coast to the south, and Blackmoor has consequently remained beneath the radar of golfers who compile their lists of English courses to play. For those who do seek it out, the experience tends to be revelatory. The combination of a Colt design in near-original condition, excellent year-round conditioning and a setting of genuine natural beauty is something that few courses anywhere in England can match.

Repeated visits are the key to unlocking everything that Blackmoor has to offer. Colt's strategic thinking is layered in a way that is not fully apparent from a single round; the positions from which certain holes are best attacked, the way the land falls away from particular greens, the subtleties of approach angles that the bunkering enforces rather than simply suggests. It is a course that grows in stature with familiarity, which is one of the defining characteristics of the very best golf architecture.