Pyle and Kenfig Golf Club

Pyle and Kenfig Golf Club has a back nine that’s a match for some of the best golf courses in the United Kingdom.

It sounds horribly cliched, but Pyle & Kenfig is the ultimate course of two halves.

If you could airlift the front nine at Portstewart and attach it to the back nine here, you would have a GB&I top-25 course.

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Indeed, Philip Mackenzie Ross wrote to the club in 1946 and intimated he had seen no finer golfing land than that on the back nine at Pyle & Kenfig.

Ross, the man who laid out Turnberry’s Ailsa, was not exaggerating – and he made a fine job of working with the magnificent duneland.

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The front half is perfectly good but, frankly, you go to Pyle & Kenfig for the awesome holes cut through the dunes.

Played towards the end of the day with weak sunlight casting shadows across the rippling fairways, it’s an experience you’ll recall for years to come.

It’s not bad in a storm either, although the rough-covered dunes greedily swallow up drives and approaches made more wayward by the conditions.

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Beyond the hillocks, valleys and dunes you can drink in views of The Bristol Channel, Gower Peninsula, Sker House and the Welsh Mountains.

You might also look wistfully at the virgin dune land adjoining the course and wonder why it could not stretch into it. The club surely do so, but SSSI prevents expansion and instead we must all be grateful for what we have in existence.

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• Course has: Bar
• Course does not have: Buggy Hire
• Course does not have: Driving Range
• Course does not have: Practice Green
• Course has: Pro Shop
• Course has: Restaurant
• Course has: Trolley Hire
• Course does not have: Dress Code
• Course has: Club Hire
• Course does not have: Handicap