A true star—no other golf course has played as big a role in movie history as Stoke Park. It was the setting for the first encounter between James Bond (Sean Connery) and Auric Goldfinger (Gert Fröbe) when they play a high-stakes game for a bar of gold. The match ends when Bond cheats his way to victory, but Goldfinger’s manservant Oddjob has the last word when he severs the head of a statue with a deft throw of his steel-rimmed bowler. In later years, scenes from the 18th Bond movie “Tomorrow Never Dies” and “Bridget Jones’s Diary” were filmed here as well. But the 27-hole course west of London is a must for more than movie fans: In 1908, famed designer Harry Colt created a timeless jewel in over 345 acres of forest and parkland. The difficult 16th hole of Augusta, the telling location for so many US Masters games, was modeled after the 7th hole at Stoke Park with its water hazard to the left of the green.
