Dorking

Par 66s get a bad rap — written off as executive layouts built for quick rounds and low expectations — but Dorking Golf Club earns its place in the Surrey hills as one of England's older established clubs, tracing its roots back to the late Victorian era when golf was spreading rapidly across the Home Counties. The course sits within the Surrey Hills Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, a landscape of chalk downland, ancient woodland, and steep wooded escarpments that shaped English golf's earliest inland traditions long before heathland became fashionable.

The par 66 format reflects the terrain rather than any lack of ambition. Short par 4s played across or along hillside slopes demand accuracy and local knowledge over raw distance, and the elevated positions the course occupies reward good ball-striking with views across the Weald that no scorecard figure could capture.

Dorking town itself sits at the foot of Box Hill, one of the most visited landscapes in southern England, which gives the club a setting that visitors tend to remember well beyond their scorecard.