Built on groundwork.

A construction business that built its place in golf.

Countrywide is built on concrete. John's father has run groundworks and concrete jobs since the 1960s, large civil work long before golf came into it. He went out on his own, and the business has laid tarmac, built car parks and handled groundworks ever since, work it still does today. Decades of it. That is the foundation: do the work properly, and the next job follows.

That is how the golf side came about. Burhill Golf Group brought us in for a car park, asked us back for pathways, then for drainage out on the course. Each job led to the next because the last one was done right. When Burhill asked whether we could take on their bunkers, we looked at the systems on the market the way we look at any job, properly, and the answer pointed straight back to what we know best: concrete. A concrete bunker system was the right fit, and Countrywide Golf grew out of that decision.

We now work on courses around the country, and the relationship that started it all still runs across the Burhill group. The way we think about a course has not changed. A green or a bunker is only as good as the ground beneath it, and that ground is where our experience lies.

Why we install one system, and only one.

There are several bunker liners on the market, and most contractors will fit whichever one a client asks for. We do not. We install Capillary Flow, and we have made a deliberate decision not to fit anything else.

The honest reason is that we have looked at the alternatives and do not rate them the same way. The cheaper liners do not last. In a few seasons they have to be dug out and replaced, which means a club pays twice. Capillary Flow is competitively priced, sits around the middle of the market, and is built to stay in the ground. Installed with the Capillary Box it carries a fifteen-year guarantee, and ten years without it.

It also does something a plain liner cannot. The system uses a layer of specialist concrete that moves water both ways. It holds moisture in the sand when conditions are dry, and drains water away quickly when they are wet, so a bunker stays playable through a heavy winter and does not wash out to the edges in summer. The wider record stands behind the choice: Capillary Flow is specified at Ryder Cup venues including Le Golf National, Marco Simone and Adare Manor.

An honest assessment, then the work.

We work directly with clubs rather than through intermediaries, so the people who quote your job are the same people who carry it out, from the first conversation to the finished bunker. Usually that means we are talking to the greenkeeper or the course manager, the people who know the course best and have to live with the result.

Every project starts with a proper look at the ground. We come out, find what is actually causing the problem, and tell you plainly what we would do about it. Sometimes that points to a full bunker renovation. Often it points to something smaller and less disruptive than a club expects, and we will say so when it does.

We also design solutions with the club, not just for it. Where a course works with its own architect, we work alongside them too, taking the drawing and helping make it better on the ground. On one course, a hole had become so waterlogged it could not be played at all. We worked out the drainage with the greenkeeping team, built it, and the hole now plays all year round.

While we are on site, the course keeps playing. We plan around the calendar, and we work to limit the marks heavy machinery leaves on the turf, especially in the wet, because a clean finish is part of the job, not an afterthought. We leave the ground in the condition a club expects to hand back to its members.