Koninklijke Haagsche (Royal Hague)

The Haagsche turned down Daniel Wolf's application for membership, so Wolf hired Harry Colt's firm — Colt, Alison and Morrison — and had eighteen holes built in the Mijendel dunes at Wassenaar in 1938. It is the course the club still plays. The club itself dates from 1893 and is the oldest in the Netherlands. In 1943 the coast was evacuated, an anti-tank ditch was cut through its old links, and the Germans blew up its clubhouse. Wolf died that year. His family sold the course to the club in 1947, and eight Dutch Opens have been played on it since, from Jimmy Adams in 1949 to Harold Henning in 1981.

The dunes do the defending. Sixty hectares of steep, folded ground sit about three and a half kilometres inland from the North Sea, so a level stance is rare and the ball is above or below your feet more often than not. Colt's routing opens with a par five, begins the second nine with another, and finishes with a third in front of the clubhouse; off the white tees the card comes to 6,251 metres, par 72. Since 2011 a flock of about three hundred sheep has been brought in each year to graze the rough where the mowers cannot reach.