Hilversumsche Golf Club

If Kennemer is the Dutch Open's seaside home, Hilversum is its inland one. No course has hosted the national open more often: 27 times by the club's own count, from 1923 to 2012, with winners ranging from Seve Ballesteros (1980) and Miguel Ángel Jiménez (1994) to Lee Westwood (1999) and Martin Kaymer (2010).

Colt's ten holes

The club goes back to 1895, when John Duncan Dunn laid out nine holes on the heath near Hilversum's old gasworks. It moved to its current site on the Soestdijkerstraatweg in 1917, and after buying more land in 1926 it brought in Harry Colt, whose ten new holes opened in 1928. They are still played as holes 3 to 7 and 13 to 17, and according to the club the renovations of 1954, 1965 and 2009 barely touched them. Colt's lines are easy to read.

The club describes the course as traditional woodland and heathland golf: narrow, rolling fairways, fast greens and long, fairly tight par 4s. The ground moves because it sits on the Gooi push moraine, pushed up by the ice during the Saalian glaciation. About fifty bunkers are spread over some 61 hectares, and in late summer the heather turns the rough purple.

Two provinces, one pancake

Hilversumsche is split between two provinces. The Hollandse Sloot, an unpaved track that forms the border between North Holland and Utrecht, runs between the 2nd and 3rd holes and is marked by old boundary posts, so a firm slice on the 2nd can finish in another province. The best-known hole is the 14th, a Colt hole nicknamed De Pannenkoek (the pancake), which was played as the 5th during the Dutch Open.

Before you go

Visitors are welcome on weekdays with a handicap of 24 or lower. Tee times are booked by phone rather than online, and the club takes two-balls and three-balls only.