Moor Park Golf Club

The Moor Park estate at Rickmansworth was landscaped in the eighteenth century and its mansion rebuilt in Palladian style in the 1720s. The golf club was founded in 1923, when the estate was broken up, and took the house as its clubhouse. Harry Colt laid out two courses in the park at the same time, the High and the West, and the High held the PGA Matchplay Championship two years after it opened.

The ground Colt was given, mature parkland with real elevation change, avenues of specimen trees and a valley through the middle, is as good a canvas as English inland golf offers. The clubhouse is a Grade I listed mansion and is, by common consent, among the grandest buildings in the game.

What it asks of you

The High Course is a par 72 of 6,717 yards and is Colt at his most confident: holes routed along and across the contours rather than over them, greens sited on natural shelves and defended by bunkers cut into the slope, and doglegs whose corners are guarded by trees that were already old when the course was built.

Level stances are rare and the approach is usually played from above or below the ball, which is the part visitors underestimate. The greens are quick and the fairways run, so the course rewards a player who thinks about the second shot from the tee.

It is challenging without being punishing, which is the balance reviewers most often note: a low handicapper can score, and a higher one can get round without losing the will to continue.

What players say about it

Visitors and societies play by arrangement, so the review record is substantial. The notes below summarise recurring themes across specialist golf sites, traveller review pages and player discussion threads. They are other people’s opinions, not ours: we have not played the course. We report what comes back repeatedly rather than isolated remarks, and we do not name or quote individual reviewers.

What comes up in its favour

• Conditioning is described as among the best in the country, on both courses. Fast fairways and exceptional greens are the phrases that recur.
• The Colt routing draws consistent architectural praise, particularly the use of the valley and the green sites on natural shelves.
• The mansion is a genuine part of the day. Reviewers write about arriving at it as much as about the golf.
• The course is repeatedly called fair as well as hard, and visitors of a range of handicaps report enjoying it, which is not true of every course of this standing.

What comes up against

• Green fees are high for an English inland club, and value is where opinion divides.
• The West Course is the lesser of the two, and a visitor who books the wrong one comes away with a different impression of the club.
• The formality of the place suits some and not others, and the grandeur that impresses most reviewers puts a few off.
• Proximity to London means the course is busy, and society days can make for slow rounds.

Getting there and when to go

Moor Park is at Rickmansworth in Hertfordshire, inside the M25 and around forty minutes from central London, with its own Underground station on the Metropolitan line a short walk away. Heathrow is half an hour.

The course plays all year, with late spring and early autumn giving the firmest turf and the best of the parkland. Visitor and society booking is by arrangement, and it is worth confirming which course you are booked on.

Green fees

Rates and visitor tee times are handled by the club and differ between the High and the West. See the club’s own site.

How this page was made

The factual frame comes from public sources: OpenStreetMap for the location, Wikipedia and published architecture coverage for the estate, the design and the championships, and the club’s own site for access and booking. The opinion section summarises public reviews and player discussions read in September 2026; we report recurring themes rather than individual voices, and we do not reproduce or attribute quotes.

We have not played this course, and nothing here is a substitute for that. The club has not paid for this page, has not seen it before publication and has no say in what it says. If you know the course and something here is wrong or out of date, write to us and we will correct it.