Wonderfully manicured new course in a lovely location with all the bells and whistles. Great teepads, brooms, benches, two layouts, clear signage, whiskered C1, a delicious restaurant on property, kind people.

Par 60 with six par 4s from the longs runs 7000'. Mix of wide-open bomber holes and wooded lines. The course is basically three sections, holes 1 and 2 are wide open, 3-11 and through the woods, and 12-18 are back in the open. The par 4s feel a bit soft but the par 3s are tough and on windy days I think the course gets hard quick.

The open holes all have some OB to increase difficulty and protect the apple orchards, and the back set of holes dealt with elevation in a nice way. The whole course is set up on a hill with great views everywhere and on a windy day the difficulty ratchets up.

The wooded holes have narrow but I think well-defined and fair fairways, with difficult but not impossible scramble opportunities (at least in November after the leaves are down.)

There's a restaurant onsite that serves breakfast, lunch, and snacks.

This is a fine course that checks a lot of boxes but leaves me wanting more. All of the holes feel pretty straightforward to me and I rarely had to think too hard about my shot. It only took me an hour to play 18 from the longs, usually throwing a couple different shots off the tee.

The course is laid out in a very efficient manner as I rarely had to walk far from one tee pad to the next but there seems to be more property around that could have perhaps been used more creatively. You play two holes to get into the woods, then you play eight holes back and forth across this narrow strip of woods between two fields, then you come out of the woods and play back to the parking. I wonder if taking more time could have revealed some more creative holes.

The orchards themselves are all wrapped in OB, so the open holes are pretty much just open as long as you stay clear of the OB.

$8 during the week and $12 on the weekends which IMO is a little high for where the course is now.

I had a nice time here but I wouldn't say I had a very magical experience, which I think is what I'm looking for with an $8 fee. I think my rating could be almost 3.75 and if it was free I'd think about giving it a 4.

It's a shame because I think property available could lend itself to a better course than is currently in there. I wish instead of investing all the money in the infrastructure they had left things temporary for another year or so and experimented a bit more before putting things so solidly into the ground.

For example: The course is in three discrete chunks, but you could easily redesign the holes so that you're flowing back and forth between woods and open fields, sometimes throwing out of a gap up a hill, other times needing to bomb to a landing zone in order to pitch through the trees (ala Maple Hole 1 or Fox Run Hole 11). I assume the demands of the orchard itself forced the design into a pretty straightforward layout but still, why couldn't hole 3 be a par 4 starting near hole 2's tee box? Why couldn't hole 9 be a par 5 that finishes up hill in the open?

With its proximity to Leicester it's easy to compare it to the farm at Maple Hill but really a better comparison are the Smugglers Notch courses in VT. Meadowbrook feels like a blend of the open wind-swept OB holes at Fox Run and the tricky-footed wooded holes of Brewster's.

I played 501 for the first time the same day and the feeling couldn't be more different. 501 transports you into the local environment and the at times lengthy walk to each tepid is well worth the time because playing each hole was like unwrapping a different surprising present.

Meadowbrook felt like sneaking down to the Christmas tree on Christmas Eve and shaking each package and right away you know the first one is a sweater, the second is a lego set, and the third is a book. You may be glad to get all three but it's not a Christmas you'll remember.