Astbury has become the first golf club in the Congleton area to install contactless flagsticks to keep players safer during the coronavirus pandemic.

Their pins act as a mini elevator to get a golf ball out of the cup and enable golfers to retrieve it after they have putted without placing their hands in the hole or risk touching a flagstick.

The pins are fitted with two discs. Any golfer playing on Astbury's greens uses a putter to latch on to the flagstick under the top disc and lifts it by means of a sliding mechanism.

This causes the bottom disc to raise the ball from the bottom of the cup and release it sideways onto the putting surface.

The new pins provide an economic benefit in that, although they cost Astbury £1,800 by this time next year the club will have more than covered that cost through labour savings.

Head greenkeeper Andy Brougham, said: "Our club's board of directors decided to order them to keep golfers as safe as possible on our course during the pandemic.

"Then we discovered something unexpected, because there used to be a vast amount of wear and tear caused by golfers retrieving their golf balls from the holes after their putts had dropped.

"Whether they realise or not, many players do not pick the ball out of the cup cleanly. Usually they scuff the edge of the hole and some golfers with bad backs claw the ball out with their putters.

"We used to have a right mess on our hands when we came to repair the greens but not any more. Now the greens stay pretty much as we cut them.

"There is a lot less damage around the edges of the holes and we need to cut new holes for our greens half as often as we used to.

"I sat down and worked out that each year we shall save almost 190 man hours, more than £2,000 in terms of average greenkeeping labour costs.

"This is giving us more time during the early morning period ahead of each day's play to spend on bunkers, raking, weeding and edging.

"Taking everything into account, I am surprised every club is not using these flagsticks all the time irrespective of the pandemic."

Brougham was motivated by twitter to ask his club to buy the pins from an Essex company, CMW Equipment Holdings Ltd.

He said: "I go on Facebook for family and friends social media but for my job I exchange tweets only with people in the golf industry and I get a lot of inspiration from that."

The 36-year-old learned his trade at Trentham where he was promoted to deputy course manager before moving to his home town golf club, Wolstanton in Newcastle-under-Lyme. He joined Astbury three and a half years ago.

Clubs across the UK who use these flagsticks would seem to have an advantage in terms of being a venue attractive to visiting golf societies, an important part of the golf economy.

Astbury's greens chairman is Alan Percival, one of a four-man board. He said: "I play a lot of senior opens and this is the only fully satisfactory system I have seen for getting the ball out of the hole during Covid.

"We have had nothing but positive reactions from our members and visiting societies both in terms of social golf and competitive tournaments.

"Andy is a very talented young man, he know what he's doing."

Jon Hodges, a member of the nearby Congleton Golf Club, runs one golf society and helps to organise three others.

He said: "These flagsticks are really good. All clubs should have them whether there is a pandemic or not.

"Quite apart from not putting your hands in the hole, it saves bending down and you don't damage the hole."