Bretwood Golf Course: South Course

Bretwood's original eighteen, the South Course began as a Geoffrey Cornish design co-drawn with owner Hugh Barrett on former Barrett family farmland in Keene, New Hampshire. The Cornish front nine opened in 1968, and Barrett himself designed the current back nine, completed in 1995 to produce the 6,952-yard South layout in play today.

The South Course is the original eighteen at Bretwood Golf Course, a family-owned public golf facility in Keene, New Hampshire. The course occupies a 300-acre site that for generations was part of a working farm owned by the Barrett family; after the farm's main structures burned to the ground in the mid-1960s, the family decided within weeks to build a golf course on the land rather than rebuild the farm operation. The original eighteen was co-designed by longtime New England golf architect Geoffrey Cornish and owner Hugh Barrett.

Cornish's front nine opened for play in 1968, with the remainder of the Cornish eighteen phased in during 1968 and 1969. That Cornish course served as Bretwood's sole eighteen for more than two decades and established the facility's identity as a public, daily-fee course in the Monadnock region of southwest New Hampshire. The current South Course routing reached its present form in 1995 when Hugh Barrett personally designed a new back nine that was paired with the original Cornish front nine to create the eighteen that now carries the South Course name.

The redrawn South Course plays to 6,952 yards at par 72 with a USGA course rating of 73.7 and a slope of 136 from the back markers. The course threads through mature hardwood stands and former farm pastures, with the Ashuelot River basin and surrounding rolling southern New Hampshire terrain providing the natural backdrop for most of the routing. Bretwood later added a second eighteen-hole course, the North Course, on an adjacent portion of the Barrett property.

Today Bretwood operates as a 36-hole daily-fee facility with the South and North Courses. The South Course remains the older of the two layouts and the Geoffrey Cornish / Hugh Barrett design that traces directly back to the original 1968 opening of the Barrett family's post-farm golf venture.