Foxhills Golf Club & Resort Longcross Course Review

Foxhills Golf Club & Resort Longcross Course Review

GF Round: £120 Mon-Thu 11am to 4pm (£85 for residents), £150 Fri-Sun 12pm to 4pm (£120 for residents)
Par 72, 6,463 yards
Slope 135
GM Verdict – A very pretty and enjoyable course where you are in among the pine trees almost from start to finish, with more changes in elevation on the back nine.
Favourite Hole – The long par-3 11th where there is perhaps a little more breathing space but a long carry to negotiate across a wide dip to a green some 200 yards away

There’s no shortage of top-level golf just west of the M25 from junctions 10 to 12, with some of the best golf courses in Surrey like Wentworth, Sunningdale and The Wisley all within a few miles of the busy orbital motorway, and some of the best Berkshire courses like Swinley Forest and The Berkshire not a million miles away either.

Foxhills Country Club and Resort near Ottershaw may not be as fiercely exclusive or quite so well-known as its illustrious neighbours (Queenwood, one of the UK&I’s most exclusive clubs lies very close by) but it does boast a well-earned reputation for the quality of its golf and breadth of its facilities. In addition to 45 holes in its beautiful Longcross, Bernard Hunt and Manor courses, it also offers tennis, cycling, a superb health spa and luxurious country house accommodation in the Manor House.

The Foxhills name comes from politician, Charles James Fox, who came to live in Surrey in the late 18th century. Between his death in 1806 and now, the estate passed into various hands before the potential to turn it into a grand golf club and resort was realised in the mid-1970s.

Both the 18-hole courses are unceasingly pretty. The Longcross course plays through avenues of pines almost throughout, while the Bernard Hunt layout opens out a little from time to time and enjoys more changes in elevation. Despite towering pines being your almost constant companion on the Longcross course there is a little more room to manouevre than it may at first seem, especially on the back nine, and if you do stray into the trees you will probably find your ball more often than not as things are generally kept pretty clear underfoot once you venture beyond the treeline.

Sometimes you may need to shape the ball a little to reap maximum advantage. If you can fade it a little around the dogleg it will make the approach much easier on the par-4 2nd, for example, while moving it the other way could allow you to adopt a more aggressive strategy on holes like the short par 4s at 8 and 13.

The front nine starts with a relatively gentle downhill opener and ends with perhaps the hardest hole, a 431-yard par 4 that plays uphill at first and then round to the left to a green set close to the club’s driving range and superb short-game practice area.

The short par-4 10th may well be in range for some in certain conditions, with the final approach dropping down to a well-protected green. The par 3 that follows is one of the visual highlights – a little less enclosed than some holes and stretching to over 200 yards off the tips across a wide dip.

The two par 5s coming home are both memorable too, the 14th playing steeply downhill from a launchpad tee, with the left half of the hole slightly obscured, and the 18th then sweeping up and round to the left to a vast double green shared with the last on the Bernard Hunt course right beside ‘Nineteen', the club’s brasserie-style restaurant and bar.

Tour pros Paul Casey and Anthony Wall both came up through the ranks here, while the Senior PGA Professional Championship was played at Foxhills from 2014 to 2019. The Longcross course also hosted the PGA Cup – a Ryder Cup-style contest between GB&I and US club pros – in 2017 and will do so again in 2022.