Ponds, streams, rolling, brightly-hued greens – only the occasional splash of yellow would alert you to the fact that this is one of the hottest and driest summers in recent memory.

Unsurprisingly, this kind of thing doesn’t happen by accident.

It took quite a lot of work, and quite a lot of know-how, to create a golf course that stays consistent regardless of the weather. In winter, a sophisticated drainage system carries away excess water – filtering it through a series of tiered ponds. In summer, water is imported from the lake district to keep things green. All year round, a team of small robot lawnmowers keep the grass at the perfect length.

Much of this is the work of Peter Roberts, now 75, the owner and founder of Hart Common Golf Club.

“My family have been in the area for over 300 years,” said Peter.

(Image: Peter Roberts)

“We were tenants under the Starkey family at Huntroyde in the 1740s. Later, when they couldn’t find space for people to farm there, they put people on the Bridgewater estate.

“I was born on a different farm that’s not part of Great Lever Golf Club. Around this time, they wanted to start amalgamating the smaller farms to make bigger farms – I ended up getting moved here in the 70s.”

(Image: Peter Roberts)

The farm was primarily a milk farm, which was fine for while.

But the introduction of milk quotas in the 1980s put a cap on the amount of milk a farm was allowed to produce – a government response to national milk overproduction. This, coupled with the rise of supermarkets, made milk farming less profitable than it had been.

“I had this farm, and basically I had to do something with it,” said Peter.

“So what I did is I put in planning permission for a golf course. We had loads of people interested, and they know it would make a good course we have the population round here.

How Hart Common Farm looked when Peter first arrived (Image: Peter Roberts)

“But the civil engineering contractors wanted a few million to build it – even on land you owned – and we couldn’t make the figures balance.”

Peter was now forced to innovate. The large sums required to hire contractors necessitated some outside-the-box thinking on Peter’s part.

“We attached GPS systems to our bulldozer so we could survey the land ourselves,” he said.

Members (Image: Hart Common Golf Club)

And the bulldozer? Peter had bought that himself for a princely £100,000. It would have cost £100,000 to hire it for the year anyway, so why not just buy one outright? Then, if he ever needed one again in the future, he’d have one ready to hand. The same goes for the digger he bought for £105,000.

The only issue was neither Peter nor his team knew how to operate it. If there’s one category of object you probably don’t want to operate blind, it’s heavy machinery, though Peter and Co seem to have managed it just fine.

The course after heavy snows (Image: Peter Roberts)

Whenever work was required, care was taken to ensure things were as efficient as possible. Previous farming had made the soil retain too much moisture, so Peter and the team took dry sand and gravel from another part of the land and used it for the green. The dropped section formed became the driving range, elegantly solving one issue while elsewhere developing an important feature.

“It saved us millions as well because we didn’t have to buy the sand and gravel in,” Peter said.

The course opened in 1996, and things went well for a while. It wasn’t until 2000 that Peter encountered a serious problem.

Building the wall of the lower pond (Image: Peter Roberts)

“It was one of the wettest winters we’ve ever had,” said Peter, “and they closed the pumping pits at Leigh.

“The water table rose and you had water coming out where it shouldn’t.

“Greens are built like a premier league football pitch. If you watch old games from the 70s and 80s, they’re like a mudbath when it rains because they can’t drain the water.”

The walled pond today (Image: Dan Dougherty)

They needed to improve the drainage, and to do this, they needed more sand. A lot more.

“I worked out how much it would cost to get enough sand to cover the whole course with a layer four inches thick,” Peter said.

“Then I went to the bank and said ‘I’d like to borrow £1,000,000.’

(Image: Peter Roberts)

“‘For what?’ they said.

“‘To buy sand,’ I said.

“‘F*** off,’ they said.”

But again, Peter’s local knowledge allowed him to overcome this financial hurdle.

Picture from the creation of part of the green (Image: Peter Roberts)

“We had some guys coming in to play who were muckshifters,” said Peter, “who build houses.

“They said if we could open up a landfill, they’d supply it, and you can have half a million cubed of material for £4 a cube.”

This allowed Peter to put layer sand and gravel across the entire 24-hole course, significantly improving drainage. Now, Hart Common Golf Club can open year-round, not having to close when it rains. This constant cash flow means that he can charge less in the summer, knowing he won’t have to completely close during the winter.

Grass colouration differences showing the progress of underground water. The grass in the groove is greener than on the slopes due to the presence of this water (Image: Dan Dougherty)

Another issue was the quality of the water itself. Hart Common was built above a honeycombed network of old mines.

“There’s millions of gallons of water down there, but it’s all polluted,” said Peter.

“What we did is build a series of ponds, each one lower than the last and feeding into one another through the earth.

“As the water progresses through the soil it filters it, so by the time its at the last pond its not polluted anymore. We even have fish in the bottom pond to show how clean it is.”

Fish pond (Image: Dan Dougherty)

“When I went to school there were no computers,” said Peter, “when you started at primary they had an abacus frame; when you started doing logarithms you had tables in books – now you just do it with a computer.

“Are there a lot of transferrable skills from the farming?” I asked.

Robot lawnmower. Working by GPS, the robots work automatically before heading back to their charging ports. No human intervention is required (Image: Peter Roberts)

“Yes,” said Peter, “There was a lot of local knowledge that was needed. We’ve farmed in this area from well back into the 1740s, we’ve traded with people, we’ve known people.

“I got on well with contractors, and the contractors provided me with help. I knew the good payers and the bad ones – some of the big contractors in Preston and Manchester looked out for me.

Last season’s club captain Mark Dacre presenting money to Senior Solutions, a Westhoughton-based charity for whom the club had spend the season raising money (Image: Mark Dacre)

“We attract people into Westhoughton – these people could have been going to the coast, but look at it out there – it’s like the M6.

“The technology that came in with farming, I’ve learned adapt it. It’s just the same as growing grass, there’s nothing difficult about it.”

Hart Common Golf Club is located at Hart Common, Westhoughton, on Wigan Road.