High Post Golf Club Course Review

High Post Golf Club Course Review

GF Round: two-ball £90; three-ball £120; four-ball £140
Par 70, 6,305 yards
Slope 128
GM Verdict – An elegant downland course not far from Stonehenge with an attractive opening trio and a strong run for home.
Favourite Hole – The par-4-9th may not be long but it serves up a lovely uphill approach round to the right after a blindish drive.

Opened in 1922 and extended to 18 holes in 1931, High Post Golf Club is situated about halfway between Salisbury and Stonehenge. Its fine downland layout is one of the best golf courses in Wiltshire, offering up expansive views and generally easy-walking over free-draining turf. The opening trio sets the mood nicely, starting with a relatively friendly, mid-length downhill par 4. The par-5 2nd’s bunkering looks very attractive from the tee, while the 3rd is blessed with some interesting mounding short-right of the green.

In fact, the banks, slopes and hollows that surround many of the greens rank among High Post’s key features and perhaps its main defence. Sometimes they feed the ball in, sometimes they don’t! The gently undulating fairways are well-bunkered and many holes are lined with often quite dense hawthorn and blackthorn to provide a good test of your accuracy 

The 5th is a very pretty uphill par 3 towards a copse of pines and two of the other par 3s at 11 and 17 also play uphill and will require considerably more club than the scorecard suggests into any sort of wind. The target on 17, in particular, can look very distant when the wind is in your face! It forms the middle part of a particularly strong closing trio, with the par-4 16th a test of length for many at 439 yards off the tips, and the 18th fairway then sloping awkwardly away to the right – a tough ask for many club golfers, especially if the wind is off the left.

Right next to 18 lies the excellent 12th hole, another fine back-nine par 4 with a stand of pines long-left of the green and, beyond that, a glorious vista across to the distant hills. Overall, High Post is a fair test, and a course on which you may well need to make your score early on, for there are no par 5s coming home and even the shorter par 4s, such as the great-looking down-and-up 15th, play trickier than their yardage might have you wanting to believe.