Bishop Auckland Golf Club

Bishop Auckland Golf Club takes its name from the market town in County Durham where it is based, a settlement that grew up around Auckland Castle, the residence long used by the Bishops of Durham and now in wider public and heritage use. The town sits on the River Wear, a little south-west of Durham city itself, in a stretch of countryside that shifts from the flatter Wear valley floor toward the rising ground of the Pennines further west. Coal mining shaped the area through the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, and the wider district still carries the marks of that industry in its former colliery villages and the transport links built to serve them, alongside farmland that has returned to the landscape as the pits closed. Bishop Auckland today functions as a local market and service centre for the surrounding towns and villages of south-west Durham, within reach of both Durham and Darlington. The postcode area, DL14, covers the town and its immediate surrounds. For visiting golfers, the club offers a way to combine a round with a look at this part of County Durham's industrial and ecclesiastical history.