Test Valley Golf Club

Test Valley Golf Club takes its name from the River Test, the Hampshire chalk stream famous internationally among fly fishermen, though the club itself lies near Basingstoke toward the river's source rather than in the well-known trout-fishing reaches further south around Stockbridge and Romsey. Basingstoke sits on chalk downland in north Hampshire, a landscape of rolling, open farmland cut through by clear, spring-fed streams, quite different in character from the heavier clay country found elsewhere in the county. The town itself expanded substantially from the 1960s onward as a London overspill development, and the countryside immediately around it retains a more traditional, rural Hampshire character of small villages and chalk downs. Hampshire's chalk geology, shared with neighbouring parts of Wiltshire and Berkshire, produces the free-draining ground that has made this part of southern England well suited to both golf and game fishing for generations, a landscape shaped throughout by the underlying chalk aquifer feeding the Test and its tributary streams.