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On Course with Nature at Toft Country House Hotel and Golf Club

Ian Dair, Club Secretary, Toft Golf Club

Are golf courses good for nature? I’d say so, if they are designed and managed with nature in mind. This certainly applies to my course at Toft.

The course was opened in 1988. The owner of the land, Derek Lees, had seen the way farming was going and he made the bold step to convert his 106 acres of part-arable, part rough grazing to a golf course. Twenty one years on, Derek and his wife Marilyn, who ran the Toft House Hotel, decided to step back from direct management of the Hotel and course. As reported in The Local recently, the Reid family have taken up the reins. The members at Toft wish Derek and Marilyn well in their retirement; and we welcome Robert and Julia Reid, daughter Isobel and son-in-law Adam to the re-named Toft Country House Hotel and Golf Club.

But, back to nature at Toft. How a course is managed day to day is in the hands of the Head Greenkeeper and his team. From the start, we were fortunate that our first Head Greenkeeper, Barry Anderson, was interested in nature. He kept a species list of birds and this, in 1989, amounted to 32 species nesting on the course and another 20 seen flying over it. The list included the ’Reliant Robin‘, which insisted on nesting in the tractor, which couldn’t be used until she had hatched the eggs and fledged the young. I was able to add to Barry’s list as my playing partner was, like me, not a very good golfer but he claimed to be an expert bird watcher, he identified a black dot in the sky as a rare pomarine skua. Barry will be delighted to know that in recent years red kites have been gliding over the fairways; and a member says he saw an osprey diving into the lake by the 10th hole. More