Golf in Lytham St Annes and the Fylde coast

What the golf is like

Three links courses, all close together and all exposed to the wind off the Ribble estuary and the Irish Sea: Royal Lytham and St Annes, St Annes Old Links and Fairhaven. Royal Lytham is the name most people know, an Open Championship venue ranked 4th in the NCG Top 100s for England; St Annes Old Links, a separate club about a mile away, is ranked 72nd in the same list. Fairhaven isn't currently ranked in that list, but it's the same kind of exposed links golf as its two neighbours.

Lytham's next big week is already in the diary. The R&A has named it host of the 156th Open in 2028, with championship week running from 30 July to 6 August: its 12th Open, and the first since Ernie Els won there in 2012.

Photo to followThe clubhouse and 18th green at Royal Lytham and St Annes, an Open Championship links course

Getting there

The M55 is the direct route in, leaving the M6 at Junction 32 for Preston and running on to Blackpool; the A584 branches off it for Lytham and St Annes themselves.

By train, three stations on the Blackpool South line cover this stretch, and the nearest one to each course isn't always the obvious guess. St Annes-on-the-Sea station is about half a mile from Royal Lytham and about 0.8 miles from St Annes Old Links. Ansdell and Fairhaven station, in between, is about 0.6 miles from Fairhaven Golf Club, which is also about 0.7 miles from Lytham station in the other direction.

Blackpool Airport sits under 3 miles from all three courses, but it's not a place to fly into: its own website describes it as a base for corporate and private aviation, flight training and charter work, with no scheduled passenger flights. For an actual flight, Liverpool John Lennon Airport is about 29 to 31 miles away and Manchester Airport about 40 to 42 miles, both straight-line and computed from each club's postcode.

How close together they are

All three clubs sit within about 2.7 miles of each other, straight-line and computed from their postcodes: Royal Lytham to St Annes Old Links is about 1.2 miles, Royal Lytham to Fairhaven about 1.5 miles, and St Annes Old Links to Fairhaven the furthest apart at about 2.7 miles. That makes more than one round in a visit straightforward to plan, even without a car, given how close the three stations on the Blackpool South line sit to each other too.

When to go

Exposed links golf on an estuary is windy golf, whatever the season; a calm morning here isn't a promise for the afternoon. The sandy ground drains fast, so a wet spell tends to close these courses for less time than it would a clay-based parkland course inland, though nothing is guaranteed in genuinely heavy, sustained rain.

A few of the courses

Royal Lytham and St Annes plays to a par of 70 and takes visitor bookings online through BRS Golf, though the booking page Golf Metric checked doesn't publish a specific green fee or set visitor days the way some neighbouring clubs do. St Annes Old Links plays to a par of 72, and its own scorecard gives a course rating of 71.5 and a slope of 129 from the yellow tees. Fairhaven, also a par 72, doesn't publish a course rating or slope on its own site, and books online through BRS Golf as well.

Photo to followA links fairway at St Annes Old Links, ranked 72nd in the NCG Top 100s for England

For visitors travelling from further afield

If you're combining a round here with the rest of the coast, Royal Liverpool at Hoylake and the Sefton coast clubs around Southport are covered in our Merseyside and Sefton coast guides, reached south down the M6 and M58. Preston, with its own mainline station and motorway junctions for the M6, M61 and M55, is the practical base if you're arriving by train from further afield and hiring a car from there.