The Clubhouse, Stony Holme

History

Course opened

1974, nine holes then eighteen

Owned by

The council since it opened

Award

Best Municipal Golf Course 2023

The bar and restaurant at Carlisle's municipal golf course, on the low ground by the Eden, and open to anyone rather than just golfers. CAMRA record the clubhouse as open to members of the public, with a restaurant doing Sunday lunches, and it is well liked for its food, run by people who previously had eateries in the city centre, with filter coffee on free refill and a view over the course.

The course opened in 1974, nine holes at first and extended to eighteen a few years later, and has been a council asset throughout: run for the city by a series of operators rather than owned by any of them. It is a par 69 parkland course surrounded by three rivers, with water in play on ten of the eighteen holes, which is a lot for a course this close to a city centre. It won Best Municipal Golf Course in 2023.

The site floods, being where it is, and its recent history is mostly the story of getting back up afterwards. It flooded badly in 2015 and was fully reopened the following year; the operator Mack Golf then collapsed into administration in October 2018 and the course shut again, with the council spending around ten thousand pounds just to maintain the empty building over that winter. Jim Douglas, who had run the course for the council for twenty years before Mack Golf took the lease, came back and reopened it over Easter 2019, vowing to take the course back from the dog walkers and the mountain bikers. A further flood and closure followed in the 2020s, and a 2024 council tender for a new operator shows the cycle continuing.

It shares the flood ground with the Turf and Edenside, and it has a fixture-day life beyond golf: football fans use the clubhouse on Carlisle United match days, being a short walk from Brunton Park. And like Carlisle Golf Club at Aglionby, it will serve you without a membership card, as will the other two golf clubs on this site, Brampton and the clubhouse at Dalston Hall.