5th hole, Royal Worlington & Newmarket, Suffolk, England

Par: 3

Architect: Tom Dunn

Back tee*: 154 yards

Joe Average tee*: 154 yards

Green fee: £48.50 after 4pm. Handicap certificate required.

How she looks

*Distances taken from club website or, if unavailable there, from Swingu.

 

By the time you’ve skimmed through the reviews of this hole…

·       “Perhaps the greatest one-shot hole outside the United States” – Golf Club Atlas   

·       “…all-world fifth green” – ibid.

·       “Outside of the otherworldly USGA greens prepared for US Opens…the leader-in- the-clubhouse for the par three with the ‘green-most-impossible-to-putt-on’” – Golf’s Finest Par Threes

…you could be forgiven for expecting a cross between Pebble Beach’s seventh and Augusta National’s twelfth.

Which makes Worlington’s fifth a monument to English under-statement. From the tee, it offers none of the wow factor of its aforementioned American counterparts. Its greatness is tactile rather than visual: you must play it to understand.
Before you even address the challenges of the green, you must negotiate its surroundings. Too far right and there's a chance your ball tumbles all the way down the bank into a stream. Too far left, meanwhile...
They say Mog's Bog/Hole/Hollow (I've seen it called all three) was once a water hazard. Were that still the case, RW&N's 5th wouldn't have made this blog, for water would have been overkill and—on this hole—just as vulgar as a bunker (of which there are none).
Instead, it is a deep grassy pit, that you must golf your way out of, with a pitch to a narrow putting surface. 
A better approach, it's said, is to bump-and-run your ball firmly into the slope leading up to the green so that it just bobbles onto the short grass. Part of the folklore of this hole are the many golfers whose shaky short game has led to them chipping from one side of the green to the other and back again.
The green, meanwhile, is a challenge in itself, an undulating 35 yards in length, it rises towards the rear in a series of steps and has been described by one visitor as "one of the most diabolical greens in the world".
Although I think he meant it in a good way.