About

Gorwel Print Co is me, Jac Ellis Jones. I’m Welsh, I live between Wrexham and Macclesfield, and before this I trained as a chef and read history and politics at Oxford, neither of which is an obvious route to drawing golf courses. What got me here was a simple question I couldn’t stop asking on the first tee: what is the ground actually doing out there? Not the yardage book, not the aerial photograph — the land itself, the ridges and hollows you feel through your feet and can’t see.

It turns out the answer exists. The government flies laser surveys of the country and publishes them: a height reading for every square metre, in England, Wales and Scotland. So I built a pipeline that takes those surveys and draws them — contour by contour, in one dark green ink on cotton rag — and then I look at every sheet by hand and decide whether it holds. If the drawing doesn’t hold, it doesn’t ship. That is the whole method. The machine draws; a person culls.

Every course is a genuine edition of 50, made to order and printed in Britain. Each print carries its historic county — the one golf has always used — a data strip of founding year, par, yardage, architect and terrain compiled from club records and archives, and the name of the survey it was drawn from. If you know your course and think I’ve got a detail wrong, tell me and I’ll correct the plate.

Gorwel is Welsh for horizon.

Where the data comes from

Elevation data from the Environment Agency, DataMapWales and the Scottish Remote Sensing Portal, at one metre where the surveys exist — every print states its source. Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence v3.0. Course features © OpenStreetMap contributors, under the Open Database Licence.

Drawn by Jac Ellis Jones, Wrexham
Printed and framed by Prodigi. UK orders are produced in their British lab; international orders print at the Prodigi facility nearest you.
jac@gorwelprintco.com