Close House Golf Club (The Colt)

Overview: The Colt Course at Close House is the championship routing in the Tyne Valley, about seven miles from Newcastle. The course runs through a historic estate landscape beside the River Tyne, with woodland, water, old walls and views toward Hadrian’s Wall shaping the round. Close House publishes a championship length of about 7,000 yards and describes the layout as an Old English design that uses the natural features of the property. The directory label preserves the facility’s Colt name, while the current operator presents it as the Lee Westwood Colt Course.

History: Design work began in late 2007 and the course was developed as part of Close House’s modern golf resort. Scott Macpherson is credited with the course architecture, while Lee Westwood’s involvement is reflected in the current course name and its championship identity. The estate itself is much older than the golf course, with a history reaching back roughly eight centuries and a house established for the Bewicke family in the eighteenth century. The result is a recent course placed in an old landscape.

Did You Know? Close House deliberately built historical references into the routing. The operator points to an ancient forest near the first, a Roman fort near the 11th, a lake by the 15th tee and a ha-ha wall and ice lake around the closing hole. Hadrian’s Wall nearly touches the course, so the archaeological setting is part of the playing experience rather than a fact that sits only in the clubhouse brochure.