At The Turn: After 25 years, timeless, top-shelf Osprey Valley looks to future
ALTON, Ont. — Glen Abbey may be the focus of the golf world this week, but a rough-hewn diamond in the heart of the Credit River Valley is quietly charting a course towards becoming Ontario’s ultimate golf destination, a vision that’s been 25 years in the making — and counting.
On a day when none other than Jack Nicklaus was in Oakville, Ont., to celebrate this week’s RBC Canadian Open at the course he designed, the lesser-known but no less formative Heathlands course at Osprey Valley Resort, an hour’s drive north, was celebrating a quarter-century in business.
Devotees know the place simply as Osprey: a 220-hectare expanse of 54 top-shelf golf holes that began life with the Heathlands, a fescue-snarled, hillock-dotted brute that introduced linksland golf to Ontario and helped cement Doug Carrick’s reputation as one of Canada’s premier designers.
In those early days in 1992, there was no practice range or even a clubhouse. Golfers who knew of the place — there was no social media or marketing plan to speak of, either, only word of mouth — would change their shoes in a pitted gravel parking lot and pay their green fees in the cart barn.