Why Burnham & Berrow is a course with serious game

It’s so good they named it twice. Many hands have been laid on Burnham & Berrow and the combined talents of some of architecture’s finest – think Herbert Fowler, Harry Colt and Dr Alister MacKenzie – created an exceptional links, which stuns the senses from the start and rises into a compelling crescendo.

The setting, right on the coast at Burnham-on-Sea, is something to savour. It’s easy to get lost in the magnificence of those huge sand hills that envelop the course at so many points.

But it would be wrong to merely think of Burnham & Berrow as a picture postcard destination. This is a course with serious game and some wonderful holes.

It begins with an opening stretch that could go toe-to-toe with the best in Great Britain & Ireland.

The drive from the 2nd forces you to be accurate through the towering dunescape, while the punchbowl green 3rd is fun and frustrating at the same time if you don’t hit the putting surface.

The par 3s would rightly be in any collection of Harry Colt’s classic short holes and the pick is the 9th – requiring a heroic shot to a green surrounded by a sextet of bunkers. Come through that and a closing quartet awaits that will examine your game to its limits.

Nowhere is that seen more than the 17th, where ‘short’ does not adequately describe the shot needed to negotiate both the prevailing wind and the difficult green. The fine closer is a fitting conclusion to a course that simply thrills at every stage.

In recent years, the club has been working closely with its appointed architect Martin Ebert to make a number of significant changes to the Championship course, including a complete redesign of the fairway routing on the par-4 12th hole, new bunkering around the par-5 13th green and a brand-new green and teeing area on the par-3 14th hole.