'Senseless' vandals dig up 12 greens at golf club

Vandals have struck at an East Sussex golf club, digging holes in 12 of its greens overnight.

Royal Eastbourne Golf Club announced to its members on Friday morning that it would close for the day while the damage was assessed and repaired.

The club, on Paradise Drive, said its 100-year-old Devonshire course had had six greens vandalised, with another six having been defaced on its nine-hole Hartington course.

General manager Tom Breach described the damage as "significant" and "senseless".

"The first we knew about it was when the course manager was out doing his inspection rounds on Friday morning," said Breach, 40.

"Whoever did it used shovels to dig up big plugs of earth before chopping them up into pieces, thereby making it impossible to simply place them back in the ground."

He added that it must have taken the culprits a "good hour or more" to cover the distance involved, but that no-one had been caught on the club's CCTV cameras.

"It doesn't seem to me to have been the work of a couple of kids messing around - it feels fairly deliberate," he said.

"It's likely to take a few weeks before those greens are playable again," said Breach.

He urged anyone with any information about the incident, which has been reported to Sussex Police, to get in touch.

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