“As we are playing at Wimbledon we can see Coombe Hill, and though perhaps Coombe should have found a place in a heathery chapter, it seems geographically to belong to this one [London].” Wrote Bernard Darwin in the Golf Courses of Great Britain. “This is another astoundingly quiet and lovely place to find so near London. Birch-trees, rhododendrons and heather and fairways that find their way among them, first uphill and then downhill – such is a stranger’s general impression. People who have never seen it will probably think of it as the place where Sandy Herd was always doing holes in one, till they grew positively tired of reading the newspapers. Indeed, the scores that Herd did there and the number of times he holed his tee-shot were uncanny… Where Mr. Abercromby lays out a course, he always makes plenty of short holes. There are, therefore, several threes to be got at Coombe, but there are not easy ones, nor are the two-shot holes easy fours, unless perhaps when the ground is hard. A fair criticism is, I think, that there are a good many holes which have rather too strong a family likeness in the shape of a second shot to a green at the top of a slope. The lie of the land makes this difficult to avoid, and each of the uphill holes is a good hole in itself. Still I like the downhill ones better, and must put a special word for the sixth, a short one with a serpentine bunker guarding it, and the fifteenth with a soul-stirring tee-shot shaving a tree and cutting off a corner.”