Royal Birkdale Golf Club Review

Hawtree and Taylor were asked in 1931 for a links that could hold a championship, and solved it by refusing to fight the dunes. Every fairway at Birkdale runs along the floor of a valley between the sandhills rather than over them, so the lies are flat, the bounces are honest and a well struck shot is almost never punished by the ground. That is why professionals rate it above every other Open venue, and why some visitors leave feeling short changed: there is no blind tee shot to laugh about afterwards.

What Birkdale asks instead is total control in wind, which is the harder thing. The sixth turns right through a gap with out of bounds down that side, the twelfth is a par three to a green benched into the dune that repels anything not struck flush, and the closing stretch, a reachable par five at the seventeenth and a long par four home, has decided several Opens.

Tom Mackenzie rebuilt the back nine before 2026, turning the old par five fifteenth into the fourteenth and dropping a new par three in behind it. Ryan Fox won there in July at ten under, and the turf is as good as links turf gets. Visitors pay 495 pounds from May to October, on Mondays, Wednesdays and Thursdays only.