Golf Guide
Belles of the Ball
These gorgeous layouts are easy on the eyes, if not the scorecard
Beauty shot: Don Valley Golf Club
Don Valley Golf Course
Set among the lush, big-shouldered trees where members of the Group of Seven were said to have once set up their easels, Don Valley is the city’s best municipal course. The section of the 401 that runs above Yonge Street is one of the busiest stretches of highway in North America, a 12-lane cacophony of cars, trucks and road rage, making the contrasting tranquility of the nearby course that much sweeter.
Glen Abbey Golf Club
Once the home of a Jesuit retreat, Glen Abbey still radiates a sense of serenity, especially the series of holes that are cleverly threaded along the banks of 16 Mile Creek and nearly swallowed up by the heavily wooded hills that rise straight up from the edge of the fairways. As an added bonus, golfers can walk in the footsteps of their heroes—Tiger, Nicklaus, Norman, Mickelson, Faldo—who have all played through the valley here.
The Raven Golf Club at Lora Bay
Sprinkled with a few beauty marks—an apple orchard,
a century-old barn and cattle fences—Raven is a beguiling mix of water and wilderness. The first tee soars four storeys above a bluff, the horizon filled with whitecaps barrelling across Georgian Bay.
The rest of the course dips and rises along the Nipissing Ridge, with a long chunk
of headland towering above
the bay.
Taboo
Almost all the courses in cottage country are gorgeous, bucolic retreats. Gravenhurst’s Taboo stands out for its combination of local wildlife (bold-as-brass wild turkeys, deer, foxes, raccoons and porcupines wander nonchalantly across fairways) and the clever way the architects have incorporated surrounding rocks, ponds and ravines into the layout.
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