|
|
Baildon Golf Club
Baildon Golf Club was founded in 1896 and offers an excellent Par 70 moorland golf course, with magnificent views and superb facilities. The club is situated close to Bradford and is easily reached, yet enjoys a lovely country setting. It is not without significance that the prime movers in the establishing of a golf course on Baildon Moor were members of the medical profession. No doubt these pioneers realised the common's potential as a setting for the great game, but they were also keenly aware of the health-giving properties of the moorland air. Today's
enthusiasts are just as appreciative of the breezes wafting at them from
the western ocean, and of their tonic effect on the sober and the
sanguine, the dissipated and the despondent alike.
The 2nd hole at Baildon Golf Club is one of the best Par 3's in the country One hesitates in a survey of this kind to mention scenery. Not that golfers as a class are devoid of aesthetic sense. But if they're playing well they've no time for scenery, and if they're having a bad spell they're in no mood to appreciate it. Nevertheless, from the high points of the moor there are magnificent views down and beyond the Aire Gap, with typically Yorkshire hillscapes as foreground, and in the distance purple moors melting into wide horizons. The course itself is a fine example of a moorland links. Treeless, all-but sandless, and with a total length of slightly more than 6,000 yards, its chief hazard is its highly individual and all-encircling rough. No parallel fairways here to flatter the benders. Precision hitting, therefore, is at a premium. Not quite so much, though, as in the past (not too distant) when Baildon was a course of no compromise, when you were either on the sweet and narrow or manoeuvring in ninety-proof tiger country. Nowadays a more humane (or some would have it, decadent) outlook prevails, and generous swathes of semi- or demi-semi-rough make life more pleasant and score-cards more readable.
|
 |
|
|
Scratch
Section |
|||
