Caldy Golf Club

The strategy and ethos of our course management is to strive to remain faithful to this James Braid inception of the course, harnessing and making best use of the natural surroundings we are fortunate to enjoy, to provide an always interesting challenge.

We aim to maintain the course’s status as one of the best in Cheshire, (and something of a hidden gem), where golfers are able to enjoy the characteristics of both a seaside and inland layout. A fundamental part of our course management strategy is to encourage the fine bent and fescue grasses that are predominantly found on our classic links and heathland courses, in preference to broad leafed meadow grasses. This is not always easy, but nevertheless it is this sort of “fine” course we seek to produce.

A course that ideally is one:-

• Which requires judgement, improvisation and vision as the indicators of skill, rather than simply the ability to hit the ball through the air a particular distance;
• With fairways that are firm, composed of fine, wiry grasses and present a ball sitting on a tight lie that needs to be squeezed, rather than scooped from a high grass lie. Fairways which are dry, bouncy and running, and which brown off in a dry summer.
• Whose design requires shot making – with a yardage chart of less use, particularly in the wind – and where often shots are more successful the closer they are played to the ground, like the bump and run.
• Where the style of bunkering is small, deep where possible, and ‘gathering-in’, rather than huge and flat.
• That has green aprons which allow a ball to be bumped through with predictability of bounce.
• With greens giving a true, fast and firm surface all the year round.
• That promotes a challenge to skill, and is sometimes quirky.
• That is not always predictable and fair – a bit like life itself.

Achieving this involves something of an austere approach to green keeping at times, where we are cautious about using too much fertiliser or water, but instead favour lots of aeration to produce a quality course that is playable as such for far longer throughout the year. This encourages the deeper rooting, finer grasses to dominate and restricts build up of unwanted thatch.

Our approach is enshrined in a combination of our Course Management Policy Document, Environmental and Strategic Management Plans, all of which successive Green Committees have developed over the past 10 years.