The Pagets didn’t come into the Hall and its attendant properties until 1549, when Sir William Paget acquired the estate from a friend—King Henry VIII, who threw in a baronet for good measure.

The historical serendipities attached to this land and its aristocratic governors would fill several chapters of a book, and indeed, already have: “Beau Desert: The Marquess of Anglesey’s Course” was published in 1992. Yet for all but six years of its storied existence, Beau Desert has been a local club, played and administered by local golfers.

From the beginning, the Sixth Marquess extended play to a favored group of area businessmen, most of whom worked for nearby mining concerns. “Permit Holders,” these commoners were called. When heavy post-World War I tax burdens forced Paget to abandon his estate in 1919, he first leased the course to this group of proto-members, then sold it to them outright in 1932.

Unlike the Pagets’ great Hall, which was demolished for scrap during the Depression, the clubhouse at Beau Desert has always been a modest affair, befitting its middle-class membership (that’s British middle class, mind you). Beau Desert remains a low-key place, which along with its distance from greater London begins to explain why few Americans have heard of, much less played, the course.

There is also a working-class legacy at Beau Desert, a peculiar one having to do with the fluid, physical characteristics of the golf course itself. Because it was laid out over an abandoned network of coal mines, the ground literally buckles and shifts as ancient shafts slowly deteriorate and collapse. The folks at Beau Desert refer to this phenomenon as “subsidence.”

Some of these transformations are subtle. Others are fairly dramatic, such as the lengthy four-foot depression that abruptly positioned itself in the second fairway a few years back. This ditch was eventually filled in for safety reasons by the National Coal Board, “whose staff,” according to the club history, “are regular visitors, repairing subsidence damage as required by the terms of the Deed of Sale. … The hills and hollows on the greens seem to change from one year to the next. Hardly a year has gone by without plans being made to level at least one.”

In 1974, British architect Fred Hawtree was consulted about leveling several of Beau Desert’s greens. To the members he wrote, “There are a great many eccentric contours on greens which lead to approaches and putts which go beyond a spirit of adventure.”

Ultimately, few of Hawtree’s proposed changes were implemented. Apparently, club members shared a spirit of golfing adventure that ran deeper than Hawtree’s.