North Luffenham

Rutland is England's smallest county, and it carries that distinction with a kind of quiet pride — unhurried, agricultural, genuinely rural in a way that much of the English Midlands no longer is. North Luffenham Heath Golf Club sits in this landscape on open heathland ground, the kind of terrain that produces naturally firm, fast turf and a playing surface that rewards ground-game thinking. The course runs across Rutland's rolling countryside not far from Rutland Water, one of the largest man-made reservoirs in Europe, and the area has a particular quality of light and openness that feels distinct from the wooded parkland courses that dominate this part of the country.

Heathland golf in England has a long and respected tradition — think the Surrey heaths or Lincolnshire's coastal fringes — and North Luffenham belongs to that same honest, unpretentious lineage. Wind is a genuine factor out here, as it tends to be on exposed heath layouts, and it reshuffles the deck considerably depending on the day.

This is members' golf at its most straightforward: a proper club, a real course, in a county that most visiting golfers overlook entirely. That's arguably the point.