When a groundskeeper at an English golf club spotted a small sinkhole near the 13th hole, he figured it was just a collapsed drain and set about digging it out. As the hole got deeper, it kept opening up beneath him, and eventually he found himself crawling through a small doorway into a brick-lined cellar that nobody had entered in over 100 years. Inside, he found dozens of empty wine and port bottles, perfectly preserved and completely undisturbed, still sitting exactly where someone had left them sometime in the 1800s. The discovery happened at Davyhulme Park Golf Club in Manchester, England, in a section of the course already known locally as the Cellars, which suddenly made a lot more sense.
The cellar is believed to be a remnant of Davyhulme Hall, a medieval manor built by the Hulme family in the twelfth century that once occupied the land the golf course now sits on. The hall passed through several owners over the centuries, had a nine-hole golf course added to its grounds in 1844, and was eventually torn down in 1888 after failing to sell when its final owner died. The golf club that exists today was formed in the years that followed, and the old cellar simply stayed buried and forgotten beneath the fairway for well over a century. Club staff were delighted by the find, noting that the course has a rich history they were already proud of, and members immediately began debating what should happen next. The current plan is to carefully consider turning the cellar into a feature of the course once safety has been assessed, and to display the bottles in the clubhouse as a reminder of the unexpected history sitting just beneath every round of golf played there.
