Onneley Golf Club sits on the western slopes of Bar Hill, on the A525 between Newcastle-under-Lyme and Woore. It is a quiet and scenic spot, yet readily accessed from the A34 and A51 trunk roads as well as the M6. From the highest point of the course, there are broad views across Staffordshire, Shropshire and Cheshire, as far as the Long Mynd and The Wrekin in the south-west and the distant Welsh Hills beyond Beeston and Peckforton to the north-west; across the Cheshire Plain to the iconic Jodrell Bank radio-telescopes; or east towards the Staffordshire Moorlands and Pennine foothills beyond Mow Cop and The Cloud.

It opened in 1968 as a nine-hole course on rented land. Today, the club has grown to 18 holes on land that it owns, and it is committed to developing the course to keep up with modern trends both in agronomy and ecology, often a difficult balancing act. For some years, we have been reducing our fertiliser use on the greens yet managed to achieve a steady but consistent improvement in their quality. This remains a work-in-progress. One major project that has been largely completed is a water management system. We now have a bore-hole for extraction of ground water permitting us to maintain greens even in the longer hotter dry intervals (yes, we get them every year!) while taking action to deal with the wetter warmer spells that are now an established feature of the calendar, via improved drainage provision. Most of the infrastructure work has been completed, but regular mole-ploughing of some parts of the course will continue each autumn to ensure that we can play the full course except in the very wettest winter conditions.

In parallel with this we have made major strides in renewing our clubhouse, and extending the parking provision. Visitors or returning former members may be very pleasantly surprised by how much we have achieved in the past decade. Come along and see for yourself!

We are particularly pleased with the development of wildlife habitats around the series of ponds (linked by ditches and pipework) that now form a drainage chain from the second green via the fourth fairway, the eighth/ninth and 13th/18th holes. These have offset habitat loss due to scrub removal required either for safety reasons or to improve the agronomy on several of the tees, where poor growth has been a long-running area of difficulty. Tee improvements are likely to be a key priority in the next few years.

The covid pandemic meant that we could get on with that sooner than originally envisaged, because the next phases of the club's strategic plan were to extend two of our par fours to par fives, and to replace our shortest par-3 with a significantly harder one, using the tee of the former 2nd hole to a new green at the summit of the course, followed by a par four down to a new green beyond the former second. The work was expected to take several winters to carry out; but enforced closure gave us the opportunity to carry out the civil engineering work in more favourable conditions, and substantially all of the programme was completed in a period of months. That also allowed us to bring forward the change of the order in which the holes were played, so reducing the blockages that regularly occurred on the old layout.