Hawkestone Golf Club

Marton sits in the southern Rangitīkei district, a wide-open pastoral landscape where sheep and beef country stretches toward the Ruapehu ranges to the north and the Manawatū plains to the south. It's the kind of New Zealand provincial setting where the local golf club has been the social and sporting backbone of the community for generations — a place where you play in a proper breeze off the flats and where the greens committee knows every bump and borrow by name.

Hawkestone Golf Club is a members' course rooted in that rural tradition. Provincial golf in this part of the lower North Island tends to reward shot-making over raw power — fairways shaped by farmland topography, greens that demand local knowledge, and conditions dictated by whatever the Rangitīkei wind decides to do that day. It's the kind of club where visitors are welcomed warmly and the post-round conversation in the clubhouse is half the experience.

For travelling golfers exploring beyond the well-worn Palmerston North circuit, Hawkestone offers an honest, unpretentious round in genuine New Zealand countryside — golf that doesn't need a famous name to justify the drive out.