Saunton
 
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Location of Saunton |
Saunton is a holiday resort about 4 km west of the village of Braunton on the north coast of the English county of Devon . It is popular for its long sandy beach and known for its outstanding design, 36-hole links golf course.
The place itself is little more than a hotel and a range of family accommodations.
Saunton Sands
The beach is part of the Taw - Torridge - estuary that the Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty belongs in the UK; it is popular with surfers. To the south is the nature reserve of the Braunton Burrows ; this size sand dunes of Britain with about 400 vascular plant TYPES is one of nine UNESCO - biosphere reserves in Britain.
The whitewashed beachfront Saunton Sands Hotel dominates the north side of the beach.
Saunton Sands has been a historic backdrop to the film and music scene more than once. In 1946 the Powell / Pressburger production Irrtum im Jenseits filmed the scene in which David Niven was washed up on the beach after jumping out of his plane without a parachute and miraculously surviving this jump. In the Pink Floyd film The Wall (1982), scenes from WWII Operation Shingle at Anzio were filmed here, and the 700 wrought-iron hospital beds on the cover of their album A Momentary Lapse of Reason were also placed here. For the beach and dune scenes in the video Angels (1997) by Robbie Williams , the Saunton Sands and the Braunton Burrows also served as a backdrop.
The South West Coast Path runs past Saunton, the longest marked long-distance footpath in Great Britain at 1014 km; this intersects here with the Tarka Trail , another approx. 290 km long long distance footpath through Devon's inland, moors and coastlines with the logo of the animal protagonist in the novel by Henry Williamson .
Saunton Golf
The Saunton Golf Club has existed since May 1897. The initial 9-hole course was expanded to 18 holes by 1908; the former clubhouse from 1907 still exists as a private house. In 1919, William Herbert Fowler , a well-known figure of the Golden Age of golf architecture , designed it in such a way that it had built its reputation as one of the best links courses in Great Britain by the early 1920s .
Matches between the most famous British professional golfers of the time ( Harry Vardon , John Henry Taylor , James Braid and Henry Cotton ) were arranged by the club. The British Ladies Amateur Golf Championship took place here for the first time in 1932 , and to this day other well-known amateur competitions have regularly chosen Saunton as the venue.
In 1935 Fowler was asked to create a second golf course in the links, which is now called the West Course (as a counterpart to the older East Course ).
Both courses suffered severe damage in World War II when the golf courses were occupied by US troops to practice D-Day training grounds . The club used German prisoners of war to make the East Course playable again in 1952. The West Course, restored by Frank Pennink , could only be reopened in 1974. Today both courses occupy middle ranks in the Golf World "Top 100 Courses", and the club's self-promotion even claims that only St Andrews Links has two better links courses in Great Britain.
Web links
Coordinates: 51 ° 7 ′ N , 4 ° 12 ′ W