Batchworth Park Golf Club

Rickmansworth sits at the meeting point of the Rivers Chess, Colne and Gade in south-west Hertfordshire, a town whose position on three watercourses and the Grand Union Canal made it an important centre for watercress growing and paper milling in earlier centuries. The wider area combines this network of rivers and canal with a string of reservoirs and lakes left behind by gravel extraction through the twentieth century, now managed largely for wildlife and water sports, giving this corner of the Hertfordshire green belt an unusually watery character for a county better known for its farmland and beech woods further north. Rickmansworth grew significantly with the arrival of the Metropolitan line, becoming one of the original commuter towns strung out along what became known as Metro-land in the early twentieth century, and it remains within easy reach of both the M25 and central London today. The golf club sits within this mix of river valley, canal corridor and commuter suburb on the western edge of Hertfordshire, close to the county boundary with Buckinghamshire.