Herbert Fowler is one of those architects whose name isn’t readily attached
to the many great courses he laid out or substantially retooled. Cruden Bay?
That’s a Fowler. Royal North Devon? Fowler’s renovation of this Old Tom Morris
original (a.k.a. Westward Ho!) made it the superb course we know today. This
lack of name recognition begins to explain why a venue like England’s Beau
Desert Golf Club (pronounced bo-deh-zare), which Fowler designed in the
Staffordshire hamlet of Hazel Slade for the Sixth Marquess of Anglesey, rings
few bells. Yet golfers are unlikely to come across a better heathland course.
For his own part, the Marquess (née Charles Henry Alexander Paget)
recognized immediately that Fowler had created something extraordinary on his
Beaudesert estate. After the course was completed in 1913, Paget whisked Fowler
off to his family’s “other” ancestral estate at Plas Newydd on the Welsh island
of Anglesey. There the architect laid out a second course for the Marquess, Bull
Bay Golf Club, another impressive Fowler design you’ve probably never heard
of.
Fowler performed most of his brilliant work in his native England, but
from time to time he got around. He was the man who transformed a ho-hum par-4
at Pebble Beach into one of golf’s most heroic par-5 finishing holes. His design
at Cape Cod’s Eastward Ho! (whose otherwise odd moniker now makes perfect sense)
is an old-world delight. Fowler also refurbished the ancient Welsh links at
Aberdovey, where venerated golf writer Bernard Darwin learned the game and
played all his life.
Darwin would eventually visit Beau Desert’s 160 acres
of elevated, exposed ground some 25 miles north of Birmingham. He came away
asserting, “Here might be one of the very best of courses, for the turf is
excellent and there is a flavor of Gleneagles about it. It stands high and is
pleasanter in hot weather than cold, for the wind can blow there with
penetrating shrewdness.”
They may play the Ryder Cup nearby at The Belfry;
Little Aston may be the region’s most fashionable golfing address. But the
finest course in this part of England is Beau Desert.
