Yorkshire golf: Jamie Bower will lead bid for hat-trick of White Rose English triumphs

White Rose players have claimed the title for the past two years, with Huddersfield’s Nick Marsh, champion down at Saunton in 2014, being succeeded by Lindrick’s Joe Dean at Alwoodley last August.

This year the championship will again be staged in Yorkshire, at Ganton and Scarborough South Cliff, from July 25-30, when 40 players from 26 county clubs will target the crown.

Meltham’s Bower will be looking to go two steps further than last year when he was a semi-finalist, only losing to eventual runner-up Alfie Plant (Sundridge Park, Kent) in a sudden-death play-off.

Bower went on to lift the Yorkshire championship at Fulford and won twice in South Africa earlier this year while touring with the England squad before capturing the Brabazon Trophy as the English men’s open amateur stroke play champion.

Other prominent Yorkshire competitors include England players James Walker (The Oaks) and Will Whiteoak (Shipley), plus Ben Hutchinson (Howley Hall), who won the Scrutton Jug for the best combined score in the Brabazon and Berkshire Trophies.

Among those looking to break the Yorkshire hegemony will be the new Amateur champion Scott Gregory, of Corhampton in Hampshire.

The championship starts with two stroke play qualifying rounds, one at each of the host clubs, before the top 64 players and ties go forward to the match play stages at Ganton, one of only three clubs to have staged the Walker Cup, the Curtis Cup and the Ryder Cup.

Richard Penley-Martin, Ganton’s club secretary, said: “It’s an opportunity for us to see the young talent coming through and for them to play a classic course which still offers as great a challenge as it did 100 years ago.”

Scarborough South Cliff, by contrast, is hosting the English Amateur for the first time and club secretary Shaun Smith said of the course: “It’s fair but stern and if we get the usual sea breezes they will add to the challenge.”