Golf courses are burial grounds for many things: lost balls, drainage pipes, unrealistic expectations.
At a club in England this week, the ground opened up to reveal something else: a long-sealed wine cellar.
The discovery came at Davyhulme Park Golf Club, outside Manchester, where a sinkhole formed on the 13th hole and exposed a brick-lined chamber beneath. Inside were wine bottles of assorted shapes and sizes, all of them empty but brimming with history.
In a report first published by the BBC, deputy head greenskeeper Steve Hopkins said he encountered the sinkhole during his morning rounds. Assuming a collapsed drainpipe, he fetched a digger to investigate. Instead of infrastructure trouble, he unearthed a relic.
The cellar is believed to have served Davyhulme Hall, a manor dating to the 12th-century reign of Henry II. The hall was demolished in 1888.
“I was basically the first person to go in there for over a hundred years,” Hopkins told the BBC.
Unlike the storied wine cellar at Augusta National Golf Club, this one holds nothing worth uncorking. But it does offer a taste of the club’s past.
The site of the sinkhole sits in a portion of the property known as “The Cellars,” which once served as a workers’ entrance. According to the club’s published history, Davyhulme Hall passed through generations before being inherited in 1844 by Robert Henry Norreys, known locally as Squire Bob.
The club, which proclaims itself the fourth-oldest golf club in England, began as nine holes. By 1931, after acquiring additional land, it expanded to 18, with the design work handled by the club’s professional, Ernest Smith, a character of some note. Smith would later earn a place in the Guinness World Records for playing golf in five countries within 24 hours, flying by light aircraft from Scotland and looping through the U.K. and Ireland in a single day.
In gratitude for his architectural work, the club granted Smith honorary membership, a rare gesture in an era when professionals were rarely welcomed into clubhouses as peers. Two years later, according to the club’s website, he eloped to South America with the daughter of a member to whom he had been giving “lessons.” The club’s history puts that word in quotes before noting, with admirable understatement: “This caused quite a stir.”
So has the cellar.
Per Hopkins’ account to the BBC, members have already begun debating what should become of it. Some have suggested preserving it as a feature of the course. For now, though, it doesn’t appear to be interfering with play.
