A Week of Golf in Cheshire, September 2015

Over the past 10 years I’ve made annual trips to England, Scotland and/or Wales to play golf and see the kind of courses that are rare-to-nonexistent in my part of the world (Southeastern USA). In recent years I’ve settled on the first half of September as offering the optimum mixture of daylight hours, low likelihood of extended rainy weather and ideal late-summer golf course conditions.
Some years I’ve traveled with or met up with groups of like-minded golfers. More often I’ve taken solo trips although usually with at least a day or two to meet or revisit some of the friends I’ve made online or on earlier trips. My 2015 trip was uniquely social in emphasis with the idea being to visit and meet people at some of the numerous excellent golf clubs in the Greater Manchester area and Cheshire generally.
The other difference was this year I arranged to join an English golf club as an Associate Member, a category intended more of a “taster” or introductory membership for local golfers in the Stockport area than for overseas members like myself. But seeing as how the club has never had a need to create a specific Overseas or International Member category I was quite happy to take them up on the the Associate plan.
So I’ll use this blog to offer a few comments on each of the courses in Cheshire that I visited the first week of September, 2015. The courses in the order I visited were Reddish Vale Golf Club, Ringway Golf Club, Wilmslow Golf Club, Delamere Forest Golf Club and Prestbury Golf Club. On previous visits I’d had a single round each at three of these courses but Ringway and Prestbury were new to me.
To provide a bit of context I’m a short-hitting, lefty “bogey golfer” with a home handicap at Camden CC (in Camden, SC not NJ!) that varies between 16 and 19, depending on how many drives in the fairway and how few 3-putts I’ve managed to string together lately.
Courses and Rounds…
- Reddish Vale Golf Club, Stockport
- Ringway Golf Club, Altrincham
- Wilmslow Golf Club, Wilmslow
- Prestbury Golf Club, Prestbury