Crook Golf Club

At a glance

Club	Crook Golf Club
Location	Low Jobs Hill, Crook, County Durham, DL15 9AA
Founded	1919. An earlier Crook club played on the Mown Meadows estate from 1914 to 1916
Type	Hilly parkland on the high ground east of the town
Length	Par 70. 5,965 yards from the whites and 5,782 from the yellows on the club’s hole guide
Course rating / slope	69.5 / 132 white, 68.5 / 129 yellow
Shape of the par	Five par 3s, ten par 4s, three par 5s
Hardest hole	The 12th, The Copse. Stroke index 1
Visitor green fee	£25 on weekdays, £30 at weekends and on bank holidays
My score	82 gross in July 2026, 12 over par
My connection	Member for 18 months from 2023

First impressions

Crook Golf Club is on the high ground just east of the town, up Low Jobs Hill, and you know it before you have hit a shot. The walk in takes you along a brick path with Welcome to Crook Golf Club set into the paving, past a stone wall and the club sign, with a wind turbine above it all.

It is an unshowy arrival, and an honest one. Nothing here pretends to be a resort. Beyond the clubhouse the course rolls across the hilltop in every direction, lined with pines and birches, and from the high ground you can see a long way. The club talks about views of the Durham hills and across to North Yorkshire, and on a clear evening it is not exaggerating.

Older than 1919

The present club dates from 1919, but it was not the first golf club in the town. Golf’s Missing Links, which records the country’s lost courses, lists a Crook Golf Club playing on the Mown Meadows estate from 1914. A report of its founding meeting, in February 1914, records that “there will be no Sunday play.” That club had closed by 1916, two years into the First World War, and the club formed in 1919 is the one still playing on Low Jobs Hill.

Crook was a mining town, with more than 20 pits around it at its peak, and the names on the card still carry the place and its dialect. The 6th is The Hemmel, the North East word for a cattle shed. The 14th, Helmington Hollow, shares its name with Helmington Row, the village just south of the course. There is a Klondyke, a Sebastapol, a Stony Pond and a Puffer. The club’s own line is as local as any of them: “Play golf at Crook and you can play anywhere in the county.”

The front nine

The club’s hole guide says par 70 and under 6,000 yards, and the numbers undersell it. From the yellows the course is rated 68.5 with a slope of 129, and from the whites the slope is 132. Wynyard from its yellow tees measures 6,249 yards and carries a lower slope, 125. There are five par 3s and three par 5s, and only one of the par 5s is longer than 500 yards. The difficulty comes from the hills, the blind shots and the greens.

The opening hole, Here’s Away, is a short par 4 of just under 300 yards from the yellows, and it is the gentlest start you will get. The 2nd, Hooker’s Horror, is a par 3 of 170 yards that plays longer than it looks, so take one more club than you think. Then the course shows its hand. The 3rd, The Quarry, is stroke index 2: a par 4 of 391 yards with a tee shot across an old quarry, a fairway bunker to avoid, and a raised, two-tier green. Four holes later the 7th, The Long Drop, asks the question again as a par 3 of 158 yards, all carry over the quarry.

In between are the 4th, Crown Green, a long par 3 of 182 yards, and the 5th, Sugar Bowl, stroke index 4. The 6th, The Hemmel, is the easiest hole on the card, and the 9th, Foster’s Folly, is a par 5 of 468 yards to close the front nine.

Par 70 and barely 6,000 yards. The slope of 132 from the whites is a far better guide than the yardage.

The back nine

The back nine is the longer half, 3,101 yards from the yellows against 2,681 going out, and it is where the course is at its best. The 10th, Sebastapol, is a par 4 of 401 yards and stroke index 3. The 11th, Klondyke, is a par 3 of 193 yards. Then comes the 12th, The Copse, the signature hole: stroke index 1, just under 400 yards, with a hogsback fairway that shrugs the ball off either side, water, trees and a raised green.

The 13th, Bowden Trek, is the only par 5 over 500 yards. The 15th, Little Waster, is a par 3 of 132 yards played uphill, short on the card and easy to leave short. The 17th, The Whins, is the easiest of the par 5s, stroke index 17, and the closing holes keep the blind tee shots and sloping greens coming right to the end. The 18th, Westward Ho, is a par 4 of 333 yards home to the clubhouse.

The greens

This is the reason to play Crook. They are the fastest greens I have putted on in the North East, and that includes Seaton Carew, Brancepeth and Wynyard. They are small, they slope, and they run true. The club’s listing on GolfNow promises greens that “run true all year round”, and Northern Golfer was writing about Crook’s “quick, sloping greens” as far back as 2016.

Speed changes how you play the whole course. Approaches have to finish below the hole, because from above it on some of these slopes the first putt is about stopping the ball rather than holing it. A chip from the wrong side can run straight off the other. It is demanding, occasionally brutal, and a real pleasure if you like to putt.

The setting

Crook is not a grand estate course or a links. It is hilltop parkland on the edge of a former mining town, with a wind turbine beside the course, rooftops below some of the holes and farmland rolling away beyond. That is exactly its charm. The views open out on the high ground, the pines and birches frame the holes without crowding them, and in evening light it is a genuinely lovely place to play.

Conditioning

The course is well kept, and the photographs here, taken across several seasons, show it: full, green fairways, tidy surrounds, and greens that are plainly where the effort goes. A GolfPass visitor in July 2026 called the greens “immaculate”, and Golfshake reviewers write of “superb fast greens”.

The one caveat is the weather. This is high, exposed ground, and in a dry spell some fairways brown off, as the photograph below shows, and one GolfPass visitor found the course suffering from the dry summer this July. Worth knowing if you are picturing lush parkland in August.

Off the course

This is where Crook fell down for me, and it was one of the main reasons I stopped being a member.

During my membership the bar was mostly closed after 2pm on weekdays. That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of members and visitors play in the afternoon, and a golf club with nobody behind the bar at four o’clock on a weekday is a golf club without a nineteenth hole for much of the week.

Buggies were worse. The club has them, but for the vast majority of my time as a member I could not get one, because there was nobody in the clubhouse to hand the keys back to. More than once I booked a mid-afternoon round with a buggy, arrived to find the clubhouse closed, and found no buggy either. On a course this hilly that is not a small inconvenience. For anyone who needs a buggy to get round, it decides whether they play at all.

There was no staffed pro shop during my membership either, and as far as I know there has not been one for a few years. The club’s own website still tells visitors that buggies can be reserved through the pro shop.

These are my experiences as a member from 2023, and I cannot say how much has changed since I left. Visitor reviews on GolfPass this year suggest not much. One visitor in April 2026 reserved buggies because they knew the course was hilly, and on arrival was told there were none. Another, in July 2026, finished at 4pm to find the clubhouse shut, with no option for a drink after the round. If the bar or a buggy matters to your day, ring the club before you book and confirm who will be there.

The greenkeepers have produced some of the best greens in the region. In my time as a member, the rest of the club made it hard to enjoy them.

The verdict

Crook is a lovely golf course and a very tough one. It is hilly, blind in places and far harder than its yardage, the quarry holes on the front nine and the 12th are genuinely memorable, and the greens are the fastest I have putted on in the North East. For £25 on a weekday the golf is outstanding value.

Off the course it is a different story. In my eighteen months as a member, the club could not reliably open its bar in the afternoon or hand over a buggy, and that made it hard to enjoy what the greenkeepers had produced. It cost the club a member in me, and it costs it six-tenths of a point here. On the golf alone Crook would score 7.9, level with Wynyard. As it is, it scores 7.3.

Play it for the greens and the golf. Just ring ahead first.

The card

I did not keep a card for this round, so there is no hole-by-hole score and no chart this time: 82 gross, 12 over par, in July 2026. Below is the course card, with yardages, par and stroke indexes from the club’s own hole guide, and the name of every hole.

The published course ratings were set on cards of 6,076 yards (white) and 5,857 yards (yellow), a little longer than the hole guide.

The scores

Crook enters the rankings in joint sixth place, level on 7.3 with the Priestman course at Slaley Hall. Its greens score of 9.0 matches Seaton Carew’s as the highest on the site, and on design, conditioning and greens alone it would score 7.9, level with Wynyard. Welcome and service (5.0) and clubhouse and food (4.0) are the lowest scores I have given any club, and they are the only reason it is not higher.

Practical information

Crook Golf Club, Low Jobs Hill, Crook, County Durham, DL15 9AA. Telephone 01388 762429. On the eastern edge of Crook, around 9 miles south-west of Durham and 5 miles north-west of Bishop Auckland.

Visitor green fees, from April 2025: £25 on weekdays and £30 at weekends and on bank holidays. With a member, £20 and £25. Twilight rates, after 5pm in summer and 1.30pm in winter, are available on request. The club does not accept 2-for-1 vouchers.

The club has a limited number of buggies. In my experience there was often nobody there to give you one, so ring ahead and confirm who will hand the buggy over and take the keys back.

Check the bar’s opening times before you count on a drink or food after the round, particularly on a weekday afternoon. In autumn and winter, ask whether full greens are in play when you book.

The club names The Copper Mine as its nearest pub. Brancepeth Castle is around 15 minutes’ drive away and makes a strong day out alongside Crook.

Crook Golf Club. Reviewed by a former member, 18 months from 2023, after a round of 82 in July 2026. No hospitality received. Photographs are my own, taken across several seasons. Yardages, par and stroke indexes from the club’s hole guide, course ratings from the published card, and green fees from the club’s website at the time of writing.