wales A Fourth for Celtic Manor?

The Ryder Cup, now a fading memory at Celtic Manor, left two blessings in its wake: A boom in business and a renewed effort to build a fourth golf course.

Earlier this year Terry Matthews, the resort’s owner, reported that hotel bookings are up by nearly 10 percent -– nothing to sneeze at, considering that the Welsh hotel industry is, as a whole, down by 20 percent. “The billion viewers-plus who watched the Ryder Cup have really put us on the map,” he told the Western Mail.

As a result, Matthews aims to cash in. Celtic Manor Hotel & Country Club plans to add more hotel rooms, a new ballroom, and another 18-hole golf course.


“People thought 30 years ago that I was crazy to build a resort here, but now we’re rated as Europe’s top golf resort and the sport venue of the year for 2011,” Matthews told the Mail. “We’ve put Newport on the sporting map, and Wales as well.”

Matthews was born in a maternity hospital that once operated on the Celtic Manor property. He bought the hospital in 1980, converted it into what’s become the resort’s Manor House, and began accumulating more land. Today he owns 1,400 acres, upon which can be found a pair of hotels (330 total rooms), a 200-year-old inn, condos, meeting space, a spa, and a slew of recreational amenities.

Celtic Manor’s main attractions, however, are its ever-evolving golf courses. The first one, Roman Road, was designed by Robert Trent Jones and opened in 1995. The next year Matthews added Coldra Woods, a par-59 practice course, and he followed it in 1999 with Wentworth Hills, a track designed by Robert Trent Jones, Jr.

The Coldra Woods and Wentworth Hills courses were eventually razed. Colin Montgomerie used parts of both tracks to create the resort’s Montgomerie course, which debuted in 2007, and Ross McMurray of European Golf Design used roughly half of Wentworth Hills to create the Twenty Ten Course, which was expressly created to host the 2010 Ryder Cup.

The resort’s fourth course isn’t a new idea, as it’s been on the drawing board since the late 1990s. Matthews, who doesn’t golf, has provided no specifics about the kind of course he plans to build, but he told the Mail that his objective at Celtic Manor is to offer three championship-length tracks.

“Whoever said I’d take a back seat after the Ryder Cup is nuts,” he said in his conversation with the paper. “People are surprised when they see that the golf is continuing, but of course we are carrying on. Once I commit to something, I don’t back down.”

Some information in this post originally appeared in the July 2011 issue of the World Edition of the Golf Course Report.