As in the rest of the country, golf at northern Michigan’s top courses is booming. Arcadia Bluff’s rates are up to $250, yet the tee sheets on both courses are still full every day until about 6 PM. You can probably get lucky and snag a time for 2 off a cancellation a few weeks ahead if you’re flexible about when you go but if you’re trying to book for a large group, you’ll probably have to do it a year in advance. I had similar difficulty last summer with Forest Dunes—I was able to get tee times on the Loop, but nothing for the afternoon on the original course.

I had an easier time at Treetops. Although I wasn’t able to get lodging, I didn’t have trouble getting tee times. Now maybe that’s because Treetops has four courses and even with the golf boom, it’s hard to fill up four courses. But I think another part of that is that Treetops just isn’t considered one of the ‘in’ places anymore. Although it was the place to go in 90s and maybe early 00s, it just isn’t anymore as the courses were designed by now-officially-designated-as-uncool guys like Robert Trent Jones and Tom Fazio and have fallen off the ‘best of’ lists.

I noted that I didn’t understand this when I reviewed the other Treetops courses a few years back. I always thought that at least three of the Treetops courses were very good and merited being on lists of the state’s 20 or so top public courses. Having just returned, my feelings haven’t changed. Considering the number and quality of courses, Treetops is still the best northern Michigan golf resort. It’s also significantly cheaper than Forest Dunes, Arcadia, or Boyne, with peak rates in the low $100s.
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This time I got a chance to play what I always considered the best of the Treetops courses, the Fazio ‘Premier’ course. And I’m as convinced as I ever was about it. This is without a doubt one of Michigan’s top 10 public courses. The course is beautiful and nicely routed through several valleys, with well-placed and well-shaped bunkers and a challenging (sometimes too challenging) set of greens. It has a handful of excellent holes. It’s also much more user-friendly than the Jones course and a bit easier than the Smith Signature.


The mid-length par 4 first has always been one of my favorite openers in the state. The fairway is comfortably wide and the approach into the green, sweeping from left to right and open in front, is quite attractive.

And when you stand on the tee of the par 5 second, you know this is going to be a good course. The fairway is expertly bunkered, first about 240 out on the right, the a second a bit further out on the left. The layup zone is also well-bunkered, with two bunkered obscuring the right side of the fairway and one on the left about 90 yards short right where you’d want to hit it for the best angle. The green is pretty severe with a spine coming in from the back-left and dividing it into two sections. But hey, that just means you’ll have to be precise with your approach.

This is an excellent par 5, the first of several.

The third is another mid-length par 4 and another good one. Like the first, there’s ample room from the tee. But the uphill approach is deceptive. The bunkers are both at least 10 yards short of the green. There’s plenty of room to run the ball up on the left but the green is quite wide and pretty undulating.

Four is a Treetops specialty—the drop shot par 3. This one doesn’t drop as far as many of the others, probably only 50 feet. And like the previous hole, the bunkering here is deceptive—only the one on the left is close to the green.

After a short uphill hike, we come to one of the holes for which this course used to be known back when people talked about it, the short par 4 fifth. It’s only about 310 yards and easily drivable for long hitters these days, although it gets pretty tight up near the green.

What made this hole a topic of discussion is the crazy green, which has a small, but normal right side but then drops about 7 feet downhill into a small bowl at the back-left. Honestly, I don’t know what they were thinking here. It fits the terrain, but it just looks and plays a bit silly. Still, it’s a good hole when the pin is on the right, as it was on this day.

Six is a short par 5 playing through a fairly narrow valley with bunkers up the right. It should be easily reachable with a straight drive for a decent player. The front-left is open although hitting here will leave a tough putt if the pin is at the back-right.

After this point, we come to the part of the property that Fazio must have spent some time puzzling over. The obvious thing would have been to continue up the valley. But then—assuming the boundary of the property is roughly where the course is—there wouldn’t have been enough land for 18 holes.

So Fazio decided to take a left turn up another valley, but one that would require him to go up and over a probably 100 foot high ridge. The short par 4 seventh covers the first part of it. While it’s very pretty and a good driving hole, there wasn’t a good location for a green site. Fazio did his best to bulldoze the side of the ridge to create one, but it’s an awkward second shot and not one of my favorite holes on the course.

The 190 yard eighth is the more serious drop shot par 3, probably almost 100 feet downhill. This one’s a bit friendlier than the more famous sixth on the Jones course because the green is much wider and you’re not dead if you miss it. Still, these shots are very tough to judge and aren’t my favorite.

But much tougher is the ~400 yard par 4 ninth. The fairway opens up if you can make the ~200-220 yard carry over the left bunker. And I think it’s important to try to hit a long drive here because the fairway turns pretty far out from the tee and a short drive will leave a very awkward blind shot. Also, the approach to the green is severely uphill.

It’s a tough hole—especially for weaker golfers—but I like this one because the fairway is sensibly routed through the valley and the green site, while making for a tough approach, is actually very well-chosen. Fazio found a nice spot on the ridge that just the right depth for a green. I’m sure he felt that this hole was a bit of a risk, but it’s well-executed and I like it quite a bit.

There wasn’t anything challenging about building a hole on the site of the mid-length par 4 tenth, which continues up the valley from the sixth. The green opens at the front-left and is probably best approached from the left side, especially if the pin is on the right. It’s another challenging green but like the third, I like this one quite a bit.

​I’m not a fan of the pond par 3 eleventh. It’s very tough from the back tees at almost 200 yards. And there isn’t much bailout room because the hill left of the green is pretty steep.

While Fazio’s first encounter with the ridge on holes 7-9 was a challenging one, the ridge flattens out here at the far end of the property which makes for some excellent holes, including the uphill par 5 twelfth. It’s a pretty good carry to reach the fairway up the right side—probably 225 yards and uphill. But this side gives you a bit better look at the green, which should be reachable off a good drive. I didn’t get a closeup but this is another pretty severe green, long and angled from front-right to back-left with a high middle tier and low back section.

The next two holes, 400 and 450 yard par 4s respectively, are about as solid as any you’ll play. Unfortunately, I forgot to get photos from both tees. The approach to thirteen is classic Fazio—diagonal green bunkered heavily on one side but relatively open on the other, giving the weaker player an easier way onto the green. These greens both look great and play effectively. This one looks especially good because the land is gentler here and they didn’t have to move a lot of earth (or so it appears) to construct it.

When I see greens like this, I’m reminded why Fazio was in favor for so long and puzzled why he’s now out of it.

I did get a shot of the drive on fourteen from the forward tee. The bunker on the right is probably about 240 from the tips and the hole turns gently right past it. There’s a lot of room to the left, but hitting over there will mean a long approach.

And the approach…to me, this one even outdoes thirteen. It’s basically a perfect green complex for a log par 4, bunkerless and wide-open at the front-right, with the land short and right tilted to help your ball onto the green. But if you’ve driven up the left side of the fairway, you’ll have to contend with the dip at the front left. I’m sure they moved some earth to construct this green but it looks almost perfectly natural.

This elegant simplicity is something that a lot of the new big name courses are missing. But I guess it doesn’t look as good on social media as 50 acres of waste bunkers and 14,000 square foot greens that everyone four-putts.

The ~360 yard par 4 fifteenth was always this course’s most famous hole. Maybe not for the best reasons because it’s awkward and definitely a bit gimmicky. But I still kind of like it, even though it’s out-of-character with the rest of the course.

The first issue is that you actually need a pretty long drive here—probably at least 240—because the hole doglegs right around a hill in its last 100 yards. If you don’t hit it far enough or hit it too far right, you’ll have a blind approach. And you really don’t want that here because the green is crazy, every bit as crazy as the woke social media greens that I was just praising the last hole for not having.

Like the fifth green, this one is high in the front and low in the back. But it’s probably 4 times the size of the fifth green, with at least 1,000 square feet of space on the lower back tier. So despite the silliness of the green, I think it actually works from a playing perspective. If you’re playing to a front pin, you’d better have control over your ball or you’ll end up with a 75 foot putt that goes about 9 feet uphill. But if the pin’s at the back, you have some options. You can hit it back there and stop it, or you can use the slopes in the middle and right of the green to get it there.

Aesthetically, I’m not a fan. But there’s a logic to this green and I think it works. I think it’d work better if you didn’t have to hit such a long drive to give a decent view of the green. Also, like I said about the fifth green, it also fits the landscape because there’s another valley behind the green. So while I don’t love the hole and would have preferred something in line with the understated aesthetics of the previous two holes, it has some merits. It’s definitely not the worst questionable hole in the world.

Sixteen gets us back to the core strength of this course: a par 5 running through a valley. As much as I like this hole again, I didn’t get a good set of pictures. You drive off the side of a ridge into this valley, with this bunker on the right probably 290 out. But it’s one of the tougher drives on the course because of trees that encroach on the right probably 220 out.

​The hole curves to the left with another set of bunkers probably 100 yards short of the green on the right. The green is elevated and again, quite difficult. There’s a small, high-left tier over the bunker which makes for a nasty pin placement. Our back-right pin is probably the easiest—as long as you get something running into the middle of the green, it should feed back there.

The 200 yard par 3 seventeenth continues this theme of greens with disparate sections. It’s wide open and straight-forward if the pin is on the right. But there’s another, lower tier over the bunker on the left. Except for very strong strikers, it’d be tough to fly one in there and stop it. But if you can get your ball running into the middle of the green, it should feed down there.

The Fazio course starts with one of the state’s best openers and ends with one of the state’s best closers. This is a great long par 4, perhaps even better than fourteen.

The drive is pretty simple although you’ll want to be up the left side as the hole turns left and gets very long if you’re in the right rough. The approach is one of the best looking in northern Michigan. Again, like number thirteen, there’s plenty of open space at the front-right and this green calls for a running approach. But there’s all kinds of trouble left so if you try to take one at a left pin and pull it slightly, this forgiving hole becomes punishing pretty quick.

The green is large with gentle, elegant undulations.

Fazio courses were maybe a bit overhyped 20 years ago, but now many are under-hyped and under-appreciated. I’ve played at least a half-dozen and while a few were a bit bland, each was at least very good; well-shaped and with a few very good holes. Fazio courses always look great because the shaping is so thorough—it’s not just his (in)famous thing about trying to hide the cart paths, but the gentleness of the mounding and shaping of the bunkers. If you look carefully, you can always tell that there’s a lot of shaping, but everything is always so well blended together that you usually have to go looking for it to see it. His courses always look very natural, even though they probably never are.

While Fazio courses can sometimes be a bit bland, that’s certainly not the case for Treetops Fazio. The course is gorgeous, the holes are interesting from tee to green, and the greens…if anything, they’re a bit too interesting. I also think the routing is good. There were only so many options given that the routing is mostly ridges and valleys, but Fazio navigated this well. If not for the stretch of 7-9 going up and over the ridge twice, it’d be completely walkable. It's still probably an easier walk than Greywalls in Marquette, which I’ve done several times. There’s probably only one green to tee walk that’s more than 100 yards (9 to 10).

In fact, that was one of the things that stood out to me in playing this course and the Jones course again: the routings are pretty compact. Rarely is there more than 100 yards from a green to the next tee. You certainly can’t say that about some of the top Arthur Hills courses in northern Michigan or the first Smith course next door. Maybe the old masters knew a bit more about what they were doing than we’ve given them credit for.

So I think it’s too bad that this course has fallen off all the best-of lists for Michigan. For me, it’s comfortably in the top 10 public (although nearer to 10 than 1) and should probably make a list of the top 25 courses overall. It’s the best course at Treetops and the best northern Michigan forest golf cart adventure course, unless you include Greywalls in that category. It’s also the only Fazio course in Michigan. I wish he had left a few more. His style was perfectly suited to this type of property and there’s no doubt Shanty Creek and Boyne would have better courses if he had been involved there.

The final stop on my Ireland trip was Narin and Portnoo, a course that Tom Doak described as a ‘remote outpost of golf’ in the yellow Confidential Guide, way out at the western tip of Donegal. This place is a pretty significant trek even from Rosapenna, which is itself about two hours west of Royal Portrush. This part of the country probably wouldn’t have been worth the extra miles for all except the most diehard of golf course nuts (or Ireland sightseers) until recently, but the enhancement of Portsalon and Rosapenna—especially the addition of St. Patrick’s—has certainly changed the golfer’s calculus.

Narin and Portnoo has responded to this with several ‘upgrades’ to the course under the auspices of a new owner, carried out by the biggest name in golf restoration/renovation, Gil Hanse. Now when you show up here after having driven several hours through remote countryside and seeing the rustic nature of the surroundings, you might wonder what someone like Gil Hanse, whose name is associated with big money US clubs like Oakland Hills and Los Angeles, is doing all the way out here. But apart from the owner probably having made it well worth his while, it’s not so surprising when you see the land. Much of it is pretty spectacular: large sand dunes next to high rocky cliffs. Anyone interested in building golf courses would give this site a substantial amount of their time.

You might have noticed that I put the word upgrades in quotes in the previous paragraph, suggesting that I have reservations about what was done here. Now let me start by saying that I don’t exactly know what this place looked like before Gil Hanse came here. Apparently his weren’t the first renovations, with previous renovations having added the current fourteenth and sixteenth holes through the highest of the dunes. But while I also hadn’t seen Portsalon before, my review was almost unequivocally positive and that I had no problem seeing the work that Pat Ruddy had done to the course as an upgrade.

Why am I less certain here? While hole-for-hole, Narin and Portnoo is an excellent course and has a handful of the most exciting holes that I played in Ireland, I feel that the whole is a bit less than the sum of its parts. And that’s because more than any other course I saw in Ireland, there’s a real problem of stylistic inconsistency from hole to hole, with some holes looking like they’ve been here for 120 years and others looking like they were built in the last few years (and some looking like they were built in the ‘mounds’ architecture phase in the 80s and 90s). This is also an issue between the Colt to the Mackenzie and Ebert holes at Royal Portrush, but there it’s only two holes. Here, it’s probably almost half of the course.

Having said that, it’s clear that there have been changes to some of the rustic opening on the farmland portion of the property, namely adding interest to the greens on what were otherwise fairly featureless holes. This work is excellent and was probably a significant improvement over what was there before. And some of the holes on the heavier terrain also have this same rustic feel. It just that when you get into the back nine, with new holes in the heaviest terrain, that the course starts to feel disjunct. It still might be possible that even with the inconsistent style, the new holes are an improvement over what was there before. But I wish that a little more care had been taken to blend everything together or, if it wasn’t possible because the land for the new holes was too severe, that an alternative routing that could have preserved the consistent rustic character wasn’t chosen.


Ok, enough with the general comments. As I mentioned, hole-for-hole, this course is excellent. It starts with the first hole, an almost-drivable par 4 of about 315 yards, another of several excellent first holes that I played on this trip. This one is a bit awkward, but quite brilliant once you take the hole thing in.

The visibility on the drive is kind of poor, but you can see that out-of-bounds cuts in on the right. This might encourage you to keep your drive left. The problem with this is that a small creek cuts diagonally across the hole from short-right to long-left. It’s only about a 200 yard carry if you drive straight out, but becomes substantially longer if you miss left.

If you hug the out-of-bounds, there are also two bunkers about 230 out. But it’s best to be on the right side because the green is deepest from this angle.

The par 5 second is about 510 yards from the tips and has several bunkers in the middle of the fairway to about 230 yards. These bunkers are on the direct line to a new green on the left, right next to the property boundary. While the land coming into the green is dull, the green itself is outstanding and its location just left of the out-of-bounds fence generates a lot of interest for those thinking of going for it in two.

Three is another par 5, this one about 550. The fairway is tame farmland and quite wide, but the hole gets a bit more interesting as you approach the green. The first obstacle is a cluster of bunkers about 110 yards short of the green. Next is the green, which, like the second is heavily contoured, but also has a false front. It’s pretty clear that both two and three are new holes (this one used to be a par 3 plus a par 4) and I think Hanse did a very good job with a pretty uninteresting stretch of land.

The next section of the course, working into the dunes, has a nice, rustic feel. Three is a par 4 of 330 yards which isn’t too difficult, but where the wild fairway almost ensures a blind approach. Five is only a few yards longer, but features a more challenging diagonal drive over dunes on the left. You can let one rip on four but here, it’s probably best to play a bit more conservatively.

Six is a par 3 of about 135 yards that plays from dune top to dune top. The main challenge here (other than the wind) is getting on the right tier of this steep, two-tiered green.

Narin and Portnoo goes through a progression on the front nine: tame farmland to moderately heavy dunes…to wildness for the next few holes. Seven is another very short par 4 (~315) and was downwind, making it easily drivable. Except that the green, tucked behind a dune to the right, isn’t really hittable, at least not on the fly. It would take a few plays to figure it all out, but I think that if you hug the dune in front of the green, the fairway contours will feed your ball close to the green or even onto the front. But playing up the left isn’t too bad either—the left side of the fairway feeds balls back into the center.

Not too hard a hole, but I liked it.

Much, much harder was the 410 yard par 4 eighth, playing back into the wind from a tee jutting out into the ocean. The first issue here is that the fairway ends at a drop-off ~230 yards out…which was just as well because I couldn’t drive it that far anyway. The area between here and the lower fairway approach the green was ground under repair and I’m not quite sure what it all will look like when it’s done. In any case, with this wind (from the W/SW, which I think is common), it will always be a long, very tough par 4.

Nine, another par 3 of only about 140 yards is clearly a new hole. In addition to its obvious beauty, it plays well, giving plenty of room at the front-left but requiring great precision if you go for pins at the narrower, back-right part of the green.

The par 5 tenth is another wild one. Continuing to play back into the wind, the drive is relatively open but the second plays mostly blind down into a valley about 130 yards short of the green. It’s really important to hit a good drive here so that it’s easy to clear a bottleneck at this point between the obvious junk on the right and a nasty hollow on the left. Less obvious is that if you go at the green over the junk on the right, you actually have about 75 yards of open fairway.

It was a puzzling hole to me at the time but the combination of my photos plus Google Earth shows that there’s a lot of sense to it. It appears to be a very good hole.

While eleven is another very short par 3, it’s also another good one.

Playing back into the farmland, the very long par 4 twelfth (~460) brings back the rustic feel of the opening stretch. It’s about a 220 yard carry over junk on the right and you want to keep your drive up the right side because the hole turns right and, again playing into the wind, you need to cut off every yard that you can.

Thirteen is another longish par 4 to an open fairway, but with a much more interesting (and challenging) approach. This big—and interesting—green is perched on a ledge overlooking junk on the left. While the bunker in line with the green is really well short (40-50 yards), the rough is some of the nastiest on the course. Better to approach from short and right.

I think my biggest problem with Narin and Portnoo comes in the next few holes and really, the whole closing stretch. Some of them, and especially this one, the 440 yard par 4 fourteenth, just don’t look right. I think that this and the neighboring sixteenth were added a few decades back and whoever bit them did a very poor job, flattening the fairway and making the hole look very artificial. This fairway reminded me a lot of the incredibly disappointing Glashedy Course at Ballyliffin, where Pat Ruddy bulldozed a magnificent landscape to create something that looked like a 1990s American public course in a spectacular Irish landscape (maybe he did the same here?).

But the fifteenth, yet another sub-150 yard par 3, is a Gil Hanse creation and while it fits pretty awkwardly into the routing, is a very good one, perhaps my favorite of the bunch. One, I’ve always been a sucker for an uphill par 3 and this one looks like something out of the Nebraska sand hills.

While there was clearly some fairway leveling on the oceanfront par 4 sixteenth (also about 440 yards), it didn’t feel as egregious as on the fourteenth. There wasn’t anything too interesting about this hole but obviously the setting contributes a lot to its merits.

The last two holes couldn’t be more in contrast with each other and make for a pretty awkward pair. Seventeen is yet another very short par 3, this one only about 115 yards. I’m realizing that despite the variety of the settings, the fact that all five of the par 3s are very short is a real weakness. The three on the back nine all feel pretty shoehorned into the routing too.

That brings us to the long par 5 eighteenth, which felt about 18 times as long as the seventeenth. The drive is out over some of the best terrain on the course toward an old green, which I think was the old seventeenth (a hole that Tom Doak found particularly noteworthy). But before we get there, the hole turns right, we have to navigate a cluster of bunkers that turns out to be about 245 yards short of the green, and then the hole runs on and on until we reach the green, just short of the clubhouse.

I’ve played other 625 yard holes before but into the wind, I’ve never played one that felt as long as this. I hit three good shots and still couldn’t get near the green. Honestly, it’s a pretty unpleasant hole to finish and I don’t understand the decision to turn two mid-length par 4s into this monstrosity. Plus, this hole eats up a good chunk of the course’s best land. It’s just a very puzzling hole to me.

Narin and Portnoo is clearly a very good course, but also pretty clearly a mixed bag. Actually going back over the pictures while writing this review made me feel that the issue I wrote about at the outset, the stylistic inconsistency from hole to hole, is less of an issue that I thought. It’s mostly the flattened fairways on holes fourteen and sixteen that stand out as a negative in this regard.

But more of an issue than I realized when I was playing and when I started writing this review is the mix of holes and the awkwardness of some of the routing. The course starts with a bunch of short par 4s, then the back nine is a bunch of long par 4s. All of the par 3s are short. While the holes are tight to each other and walking distance between them is never an issue, the course repeatedly uses par 3s to bridge these spaces. Now that’s a good idea in theory, but I have an issue with every par 3 feeling like it’s doing this. Why not make the seventeenth a longer par 3 playing down into the current eighteenth fairway and shorten the ridiculously long eighteenth? Or cut one of the par 3s and make the eighteenth two holes again?

Maybe it’s a bit unfair to change my primary criticism of the course months after playing it from being about stylistic consistency to being about the mix of holes and the transitions between them. But both speak to the same broader issue: the course doesn’t feel like a harmonious whole, more like a collection of parts. And that’s how I felt about it when I finished. To be sure, the parts are mostly very good. The opener is excellent and so are the short par seventh and some of the par 3s. But I left feeling that the course I had just played lacked a bit of coherence, something that I rarely felt on other Irish courses, even though many of those weren’t as good as this one.

I’m not sure that there was a course on my Ireland trip that I was more excited to see than St. Patrick’s. Sure, Royal County Down has to be near the top of any list of courses that someone would be excited about seeing anywhere in the world, but this new Tom Doak course was on what was reputedly one of the best sites in the world, one which has been a tantalizing prospect for development for decades (there were supposed to be two Jack Nicklaus courses here). And consistent with that, the course debuted highly on Golf Magazine’s world ranking. So there was a good chance that I would be seeing a course in Doak’s top tier, with Pacific Dunes, Barnbougle, and Ballyneal.
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But after two playings, one in calm conditions and one in fairly windy conditions, I was a little bit disappointed. Maybe the hype was just too high, but I felt that the course was definitely below Royal County Down and Royal Portrush and probably a level below Bandon’s best. Actually, if it were one of the Bandon courses, I’d probably put it in 5th place, ahead of the Sheep Ranch but behind the others.

Why did I think this? First of all, it’s not because of the greens or the terrain. Both are outstanding. Although I’ve only played 5 or 6 Doak courses, this one probably has the best greens of the bunch. They’re a great mix of severe and subtle but interesting. Then there are some (like no. 11) that are unlike anything I’ve ever seen and quite bizarre, but in a good way. The terrain is also outstanding; much hillier than typical for a links course, but still with the subtle humps and bumps that give links courses so much interest.

My main issue with the course is that I don’t think it’s particularly interesting off the tee. It’s usually quite wide open and some fairways are among the widest that I’ve seen. Now in my first go around, when it wasn’t windy, I figured that this was a concession to the wind, which is probably blowing pretty good more often than not. But it was blowing a good 15 mph. in my afternoon round and I felt pretty much the same.

Still, part of me believes that I’m knocking St. Patrick’s a bit too much in my mind for this. This may be one of these cases where in reviewing the course while writing this review, I realize that it was a bit better than my impression at the time. In any case, the course has continued to move up the world rankings and I would still strongly recommend to visiting Americans that they include St. Patrick’s in the northern Irish golf itinerary. Everyone will agree that this is an excellent course and I think that it also provides something quite different from all other courses that you’ll see across the northern part of the island. It does have a bit more of an ‘American’ feel and I think in this context, that adds some good diversity.


Actually St. Patrick’s starts with one of its more interesting drives. The fairway narrows substantially just past the ridge where the fairway drops out of sight on this 375 yard par 4. Ideally, you’d carry this ridge but keep it short of about 260, where the fairway narrows. Then the hole drops into a narrow valley where you have a clear look straight up the green.

It all seems pretty straight-forward until you get to the green, which slopes from back-to-front and left-to-right and has a diagonal ridge running back-left to front-right in the middle. Neither the drive nor the approach is that demanding, but you must be sure to stay below the hole and hedge right here.

The second is a par 4 of around the same length with a drive that’s pretty simple if there’s no wind, but which can become much trickier in the wind—especially if it’s blowing from the left as it was in my afternoon round. That’s because the fairway comes on the right at about 220. But you also want to favor the right side of the fairway because the green is blind from the left side.

​In any case, unless you’ve hit a long drive here and have a short approach, I’d recommending hedging short and right again because again, the green slopes from long left to short right.

Like the first two holes, the mid-length par 3 third is beautifully framed by dunes. It’s pretty simple to discern the main strategic thought from the tee: short is better than long. The green is sort-of two-tiered, with a higher tier running across the back and a lower one at the front-left. There’s also ample room short of the green.

The look and feel of the course change substantially when we emerge onto the par 5 fourth tee. It’s not a long par 5, probably 550 from the tips and 500 from the next set.This hole was playing into the wind and it was bombs-away as the entire landing area is at least 60 yards wide. It might be trickier downwind as the fairway narrows to about 40 yards around 300 yards out.

The pair of bunkers on the right is probably 50 yards short of the green but the landing area is wide enough that they shouldn’t be an issue. It’s probably best not to be in the far left side of the fairway for the approach if you lay up, but anywhere else is fine. You’re left with a very tricky pitch however if you go for the green and miss wide right.

There’s a set of back tees that stretches the par 3 fifth to about 215, but most of us will play it in the 130-160 range. It’s actually pretty well suited for both lengths—there’s plenty of room to run the ball onto the green, but the green is full of little wrinkles that will almost always leave you a difficult second shot if you miss the first by too much.

Six is another par 5 with a huge fairway, but one that’s bisected by a hell’s half-acre type hazard that’s pretty near on the right and a bit further out on the left. Downhill and downwind, it was too near for me at all points from the second-to-back tees—I drove through the fairway into the crap at 275 up the left. I’d strongly recommend moving back a set of tees here, or just taking less club.

You should be able to reach the green off a well-placed drive. If you lay up, the fairway is wide-open. Still, you’re much better off being up the left side because there’s a nasty hump at the front-right of the green that could kick your ball in any direction and leave you a wickedly difficult pitch.

Seven is another mid-length par 4 with a much narrower fairway. But one thing that’s working in your favor here is that the bunkers up the right are a pretty easy carry, somewhere between 200 and 220. The wind (out of the southwest, which I suspect is standard) was into and from the right, so it felt comfortable to aim out over the bunkers and let the wind bring it back.

The approach is always blind but the green sits in a bowl. Especially given the uncertainty, it’s best to hedge a bit right here because the primary slope is from left-to-right.

What was an into-and-from-the-right wind on seven is now a down-and-from-left wind on the short par 4 eighth. This is the perfect wind to try to drive the green as the fairway runs from left to right along a ridge into the green. The only issue is not veering too far right into one of the nasty bunkers. It would be a very awkward hole if the wind were coming from the right, but this would be out of the northeast, which appears to be uncommon in this area.

Nine plays back the opposite direction again but a little more off to the right…and more directly into the wind. That made this hole, the first long par 4 of the day play brutally long. Again, the fairway is quite wide but it was critical to be up the left side because the hole simply plays too long if you went out to the right (which I did, twice).

It’s a very good approach, wide open up the right but with about the left third of the green guarded by dunes. The angle in is a bit better from the right (although I couldn’t reach so it didn’t even matter…) but I don’t think that really matters because if you’re up the left side, you’d still want to play your second a bit out to the right. It was irrelevant because I couldn’t reach it, but if you can reach the green, you could use the slope at the back-right to feed one onto its right side.

It’s a big, wide open hole, but there are a lot of interesting subtleties at the edges.

The 410 yard par 4 tenth looks challenging, but is another easy driving hole. The junk that you see off the tee is only about a 200 yard carry and the fairway beyond this is between 50 and 95 (!) yards wide. It’s definitely best to be up the left side here because there’s a huge bunker right of the green and the left side gives you a clear view into it. There’s a pretty substantial sideboard at the back left side but the ball can also get stuck up there and leave an impossible shot if you don’t run deep enough into the green.

I’m not sure I remember a fairway that felt wider to me than that on the long par 4 eleventh. There’s nothing to say about the drive here but a hell of a lot to say about the green. It’s one of the strangest that I’ve ever seen. Coming into it, it looks two tiered, with a high-tier on the left and a low one on the right that has a bank on its right side. Actually, there’s another high tier on the right. And the low level in the middle broadens at the back.

The best way to describe the contours of this green are T-shaped or maybe Y-shaped; the low part is Y-shaped but there are high tiers alongside the stem of the Y. I guess I’d say you should try to hit your drive up the opposite side of the fairway from where the pin is but I’m not sure that this matters much. It’s really all about precision on the approach and good lag putting when you inevitably end up in a tough spot.

Although the drive again is not too interesting, I thought that the ~540 yard par 5 twelfth was one of the better holes on the course from tee-to-green. That’s because the fairway narrows to a small gap at about 420 and you need to be able to hit your first two shots ~445 to get it up to the next level and have a clear view of the green for your third. This hole played almost directly into the wind, so it was quite tough to do. If you don’t make it, you’ll have a very challenging, blind third.

The green is a bit tamer, but it runs off at the left and there are some interesting contours to contend with if you miss over here.

The ~360 yard par 4 thirteenth has a different look, up and over the highest dune ridge on the property. This looks to have been the most difficult part of the property and Doak et al elected to cut through the high ridge. It doesn’t take more than about 220 to get a clear view of the green but the fairway does narrow somewhat beyond this. Still, it’s probably one of the tougher driving holes because you’re very exposed at this high point and you’re almost certainly facing a cross wind from the left.

Fifteen is an obviously excellent driving hole. The safe play is out to the left but it’s pretty easy to run through the fairway into the dunes on this line. And it’s only 190-220 to carry the bunker up the right, so the hole almost demands that you take on the riskier shot. You should probably do it, but it puts you at risk of landing in the junk on the right if you let it slip a little—it’s pretty close to your driving line.

On a course that is not noteworthy off the tee, this is a great driving hole by any standard.

I’ve seen a lot of people point to the short, uphill par 3 fifteenth as the weak point of St. Patrick’s. I completely disagree with this; it was probably my favorite par 3 of the bunch.

Having seen so many great ones on the heathland courses of southeast England, I’ve become a sucker for an uphill par 3. But—in addition to providing a link to higher ground for the big downhill next hole—it’s a very well-measured hole in its own right. It looks like a tight target, but it’s not. The green is very broad at the front, which is important because you’re playing a short iron 25 feet uphill into the wind. I’d imagine that there are some disasters on this hole, but it isn’t asking anything unreasonable. And hell, there’s a lay up fairway if the 130 yard shot is too much for you.

By contrast, most people seem to love the long, downhill par 4 sixteenth. It’s not hard to understand why. It gives you a beautiful, panoramic view of the property and it’s very forgiving. You’d be hard-pressed to miss this fairway…although it’s possible to reach the bunker up the right if you’re really wild.

The approach is straight-forward. The main issue is distance control—always an issue when a hole is playing downwind and the ball is bouncing.

​Seventeen is a medium-long par 3 with a green perched over a big dip at its front. There’s plenty of room to bail out right if the pin is on the left and you’re worried about distance control. But the green runs uphill to the back-right and bailing out here will leave a tricky, downhill put to a left green. A lot of people seem to like this hole too, but I didn’t find it to be all that interesting.

Downhill and with the wind down and from the right, eighteen should be a simple driving hole. The green is fairly broad and the approach also shouldn’t be too difficult, but there are severe penalties for missing here: a massive pit at the front-right and all kinds of junk on the left.

As has happened a few times before, I set out on this review thinking there was a chance that having another look at the pictures and thinking more about the holes some time after visiting the course would change my view of it a bit. But it really hasn’t. Besides the spectacular site, it’s clear what the strength of St. Patrick’s is: the greens. But it’s also clear to me now that the course just isn’t that interesting from tee-to-green. Save for the fifteenth hole, there’s not really a lot of thought required off the tee here. There are a few holes where you might want to club down to avoid running into junk, but there usually isn’t too much to think about at the sides. There are a few holes where you’ll have a better angle from one side of the fairway than the other, but unlike at Pacific Dunes, where the narrow greens can make for some very awkward angles off misplaced drives, I didn’t feel that drive placement was as important here.

There may be a point to this, however: it’s possible that there are any days that are significantly windier than what I experienced. The course played very easy in my calm first round and I didn’t feel that it was particularly difficult in my consistent 10-15 mph. second round either. But maybe 25 mph. winds are common here and the course is designed to be played in those. Maybe if I played it in very heavy winds, I’d appreciate the width off the tee and the fact that fairway placement isn’t so important.

Looking at the almanac, the winds in this area appear to vary from a low of 11.3 mph in July to a high of 16.8 mph in January. At the 90th percentile, the winds are between 18-20 mph. thought the summer to 25-27 in the winter. So what I experienced in my second round was probably near the average for that time of year (~13 mph in early May).

This suggests to me that they designed the course to be a bit on the safe side. I think it’s pretty easy at average winds and a 25 mph. wind is pretty uncommon. I can’t say that I fault Doak or the resort owners for hedging on the safe side—you’d rather that guests have a good round than spend all day losing balls (you can go do that next door on Pat Ruddy’s Sandy Hills Links). But it does make the course less interesting for me than some of its peers at Bandon and Cabot. Those places are windy too but I found each to be much more interesting off the tee than St. Patrick’s—except for the Sheep Ranch, but that’s the case-in-point because I found it to be by far the least interesting of the Bandon courses.

Still, St. Patrick’s was clearly the third best course between Dublin and Donegal and even though it’s a bit out of the way, it’s worth a visit for traveling Americans because there are three other good courses in the area (the other two here and especially Portsalon) and the Rosapenna Hotel is a lovely place, very comfortable, with two good restaurants and good facilities (pool/sauna/steam room). It has a brawnier, more American feel than the other Irish links courses and while that may not be my favorite thing in its own right, it does complement the other courses in the region very well.

Now we get into the part of my Ireland trip that includes several of the courses which Tom Doak described in the yellow Confidential Guide as ‘remote outposts of golf.’ My last five courses, Portsalon, the three at Rosapenna, and Narin and Portnoo are all in Donegal, the northwestern county of the Republic. Apparently when Doak visited them in the 80s and early 90s, they were all very rustic and of Portsalon, he said that much of it was buried in a drift of sand and he wasn’t sure that it was still there at all.

But in his quest to protect Irish links clubs from the EU regulatory agencies, Pat Ruddy convinced many of them in the late 80s and early 90s that they needed to build courses on their remaining links land now, or else looming regulations would mean that they would never be able to do so. That gave us some unfortunate new courses that would have been better left as sand dunes (Ballyliffin’s Glashedy Course), but also led to the updating of several existing courses, including Portsalon. Doak visited Portsalon again sometime in the late 00s and noted that while it had a few dull holes, Ruddy had transformed Portsalon into an excellent course, with outstanding views and a few outstanding holes to match.

I agree completely with Doak’s assessment. This is a fine course and probably the only course outside of what I’d consider the top tier of Irish courses that I played (Royal County Down, Royal Portrush, St. Patrick’s, Portmarnock, The Island) that wasn’t disappointing. While it doesn’t quite have the drama of Portstewart, hole-for-hole, it’s probably a sounder course. It’s true that the course gets a bit repetitive around the turn but apart from that, it has a fine and interesting mix of holes in the dunes near the coast and holes on hillier inland ground. Along with Ardglass and Narin and Portnoo, this is the only course that I played where a significant portion of the course is not on links land. And of these, Portsalon has by far the best inland holes. In fact what  the strongest stretch of holes, 13-15, crosses hilly inland terrain.

Unfortunately Portsalon has the same negative as almost all of the other second tier Irish courses: it’s too expensive for what you get. While at 150 euros, it’s not as egregious as Portstewart (£235) or the Ballyliffin courses (180 euros for the Old, 200 for the Glashedy), I’d say that this course would be reasonably priced in the $125-145 range, not in the upper $100s. But if you’re an American who’s come all the way to Donegal to play golf, it’s a worthwhile stop. Stay at Rosapenna and take the 20-30 minute drive out here. It’s a bit different than most of the other Irish links courses and while a bit on the pricey side, it’s still definitely worth playing.


While I noted that 13-15 might be the strongest stretch of holes, for a two hole stretch, you can’t beat the openers. The ~355 yard opener (the scorecard is in meters) competes favorably with Ardglass and Royal County Down for the best opener on my trip. It’s only about 150 yards to carry the ditch, which is actually a walking path to the massive beach on the left. You want to keep your drive up the left here, which, if you hit it far enough will give you a view of the flagstick and from which you won’t have to cross as bumpy of terrain. The terrain walking from the fairway to the green and around the green is about as good as anything you’ll find anywhere.

Tom Doak singled out the ~430 yard par 4 second as a great hole and I’d second that in the strongest possible way. To put it simply, this is in the top 10 holes I’ve played anywhere in the world.​

It starts with what might be the single best drive that I’ve seen. Obviously it’s an incredible view over the beach and the river. Also obviously, it’s a diagonal carry over them and the more you carry, the shorter second you’ll have—a serious issue on a long par 4. And the carry distances are almost perfect. Short hitters don’t have to make any carry if they don’t want to, but then you have every length carry from 150 up to 270 depending on your preference. And the carry on the ideal line is about 240, which seems almost perfect for longer hitters. So blocking out everything on the right side, this is obviously a great driving hole.

But it’s what’s going on on the right side that brings it to yet another level. There’s a dune ridge running diagonally up the entire right side of the fairway. So the further you bail out to the right, the more likely you are to go over the dune ridge and have a long and blind approach. The only negative I’d note about that is that just over the dune ridge is the seventeenth fairway and there were a lot of people from this hole in the seventeenth fairway when I was playing that hole.

If you’re a long hitter, the drive is even more exacting because two high mounds narrow the fairway starting at just under 300 yards. If you hit driver and push it just a little, you’ll be stuck behind them…or maybe in them. If you want to fit one in the narrow opening between them and the fairway, you’ll have to make about a 270 yard carry and be very accurate. But if you hit the fairway, you’ll have a flat lie and a short shot into the green. So in short, this is an extraordinary driving hole for everyone.

…And actually the approach and the green are quite good too. The river crosses the fairway at about 350 yards but beyond that, it’s open ground to the green. As if it needed it, the green is one of the most interesting on the course, softly domed with lots of interior contour. Even without the rest of the hole, this green probably would have stood out to me as one of the best I saw on my trip. But it’s not likely to be what you remember about this hole.

If there were ever a course worth playing for one hole, it’s this course for this one. Fortunately many of the others are very good too, so let’s move on.

We can see pretty quick that it’s not going to be too much of a letdown after that—the ~360 yard third crosses very fine links terrain. The green is in line with the left rough but—as I learned the hard way—you don’t want to try to cut it short. A drive up the right may leave a slightly worse view of the green but because the hole isn’t too long, just put one out there somewhere. The massive double green (shared with the ninth) is beautifully contoured.

Four is a mid-length par 5 that looks fairly similar from the tee. The green should be very reachable if the wind isn’t unfavorable and you can shorten the approach again by cutting up the left. The second is very forgiving for those who can’t reach the green as the fairway is shaped like a half-pipe. But the noteworthy thing here is just how interesting all the little rumples in the fairway are. Links terrain at its finest.

We reverse direction for the ~200 yard par 3 third. While it’s challenging, this isn’t my favorite hole because while the green site in the dunes is great, the green itself looks kind of like a table top. Ruddy should have tried harder to blend the green in better to its surroundings.

While the layout of the ~450 yard par 4 sixth is similar to the third and the fourth, it gives you a great view of the beach. The drive requires some accuracy but the real difficult is in the approach, which is probably the course’s most difficult. The green is narrow and sits up on a ridge, with run-offs at the front and right. It’s probably on the cusp of being too severe but the pitch from short isn’t too hard and it’s a good place to miss (much better than missing right).

Through the dunes again on the ~390 yard seventh, but this time the hole bends a bit to the right. The green is elevated again but it’s a much broader target than the previous one.

The ~530 yard par 5 eighth isn’t too difficult, but it’s a good hole crossing more fantastic terrain. It’s becoming clear at this point that while there are a lot of holes that don’t have much going on design-wise from tee to green, the contours in the fairways provide plenty of interest.

The hole doglegs left and there isn’t too much trouble if you hug the left side. The major feature here is a cluster of three bunkers in the middle of the fairway starting about 90 yards short of the green. Carrying these shouldn’t be an issue if you’ve hit a decent drive. The remainder of the hole is open into the green and it presents a good opportunity to make up a shot.

The drive is much tighter on the long (450+) par 4 ninth. There are staggered fairway bunkers, first right, then left, although the second is probably out of reach for all but very long hitters. The approach is pretty straight-forward but the green is quite narrow for such a long hole. But there’s no trouble short and it’s a good place to miss.

Ten is a lovely par 3 of about 155 yards—nice setting, well shaped bunkers given the surroundings. Just a nicely conceived and constructed hole.

The next two holes, a ~550 yard par 5 with a flat fairway and a dull ~180 yard par 3 over flat terrain are clearly the weak point of the course.

But then the character of the course completely changes and it gets very good again. I just loved the short par 4 thirteenth. It’s probably best to play it conservatively, laying up off the tee and then wedging on. But it’s also possible for longer hitters to drive one up near the green. To to that, they’ll have to be quite accurate because the fairway narrows to under 15 yards between trees on the left and dunes on the right at about 270. If you lay back, you must play up the right side or you’re likely to be at least partially blocked by trees.

The new green, set up to the left past a rock wall with trees framing the background, presents a very different look but the course is stronger for it.

Playing from up the hill over the thirteenth green, fourteen is also an excellent hole…but one which I really wish I had a second stab at. It’s clear that the hole turns right and that you run out of fairway on the left (at about 250). But what isn’t clear is that you also run out of fairway if you go up the middle and that you must cut at least some of the right side off. If you go up the middle, your ball can kick forward into some nasty long grass-filled hollows at about 270. There’s more room over the dunes right than you can see and at only about a 220 yard carry, it’s important either to aim right or hit something up the fairway with a cut. It’s a very good driving hole, but definitely one where you need an understanding of the lay of the land.

The approach is pure links, over bumpy terrain to a green that looks just to have been shaved down from its surroundings. It’s another excellent green on a course that probably has the best set of surface contours I saw on my trip, except for St. Patrick’s.

Teeing off right behind the fourteenth green and going back up the hill, the short par 3 fifteenth is another fine hole. While you need a solid shot to make it up there, this hole is made by its green, which may be the finest on the course.

The mid-length par 4 sixteenth shouldn’t be too hard…just don’t pull your drive. After the up-and-over blind drive the hole runs gently downhill over more modest farmland. But the approach over a creek framed by the picturesque village and mountains is certainly aesthetically pleasing, if not outstanding.

Seventeen is another reachable par 5 that doglegs left around a creek and gorse so while you’d like to be up the left side, there’s certainly risk in it. No matter where you drive it, you’ll probably have to contend with golfers playing the second hole who have driven it over the ridge into this fairway. The approach runs uphill and tilts a bit left. If you go for the green in two, be wary of the gorse on the left.

At around 400 yards and pretty wide open, eighteen is much more difficult than it appears. The first challenge—especially on into a wind quartering from the left, was carrying the very unusual sunken footpath that runs down to the beach and is a diagonal carry up to 230 yards if you go up the right side. This would make for a very challenging driving hazard…if it weren’t for the fact that it’s covered with a chain link fence and your ball will bounce off it if it hits it (evidenced by blue marks from the fence paint, which I know from experience).

The approach is over a very narrow creek but the green is broad and flat. Not the most inspiring finishing hole, but still one that presents a good challenge.

My initial impression of Portsalon was that it wasn’t too far behind either Portmarnock or The Island in quality. Revisiting it now reinforces my initial impression. While the number of outstanding holes is limited and many of the remaining holes are fairly similar from tee to green, most cross interesting terrain and the greens are consistently very good. This course reminds me of the Old Courses at both Ballyliffin and Rosapenna which are both over very good links terrain. But I think that the supporting cast of holes here is stronger than either of those courses because the dune ridges along the fairways create more interesting driving. Plus, the the greens are much better. And this course has one all-world hole and 3 or 4 other excellent ones, all of which those courses lack. So it's a much better course than those.

Upon reflection, I think I’m comfortable calling this the leader of the second-tier Northern Irish/Ireland courses, just ahead of Portstewart. It’s definitely not as flashy and many would dock it for feeling a bit repetitive from the middle of the front nine through the beginning of the back. But while it definitely doesn’t feel as repetitive, Portstewart’s back nine isn’t exactly full of great holes. And while the front nine has some fine holes and is memorable, this isn’t always for the best of reasons. With the exception of eleven and twelve, the Portsalon holes have interesting, often challenging drives over good terrain playing to good greens. It may not be as good for championship golf as Portstewart, but Portsalon strikes me as more solid throughout.

So if you go to Ireland with your golf clubs and make it as far as Donegal, be sure to play Portsalon. It’s an excellent complement to St. Patrick’s, which given the rankings is likely to make Rosapenna a common destination for American golfers (although it was surprisingly empty when I was there). But honestly, I think I liked Portsalon almost as much as I liked St. Patrick’s.

Everyone knows which are the top 2 courses in Northern Ireland. But do you know which is 3rd? The consensus appears to be Portstewart’s Strand Course, just a short drive west of Portrush. While not as well-known as Royal County Down or Royal Portrush, the course got some attention when Jon Rahm won the Irish Open here in 2017 and, judging by the high green fees, appears to be on the itineraries of a lot of visiting Americans. And the dunes here are at least as impressive as anything at Royal County Down. So it’s a course worth discussing and, if you’re on an Irish golf trip and the budget isn’t an issue, one worth visiting.

But while Portstewart is a very good course, it’s clearly a few rungs below the Northern Irish top 2 and I’d also have it below the top 3 courses that I played on this trip in the Republic, St. Patrick’s, Portmarnock, and The Island. Like several of those, Portstewart covers some pretty heavy terrain. But it does it in the least artful way of the bunch, with several holes in the heavy dunes on the front nine coming off as a bit gimmicky: too narrow and with some awkward routing choices. To be fair, the dunes area really big; many are 40-50 feet high rather than the 5-10 feet that you find on a lot of links courses. But you could say the same of some of the dunes at Royal County Down and The Island and they (well, more the former than the latter) seem to handle it without the degree of awkwardness and severity.

Portstewart is a tale of two nines, with the first nine running through the large dunes and the back nine running over more standard links land, albeit a bit hillier than your usual links land. The club didn’t acquire the land that covers the front nine until the 1960s and didn’t construct it until 1992. The previous course consisted of the back nine and part of what’s now called the Riverside Course, neighboring and on similar terrain to the current back nine.


The first hole, which is a bit of a mix of the terrain from the front nine and the back nine, is said to be considered (according to the yardage guide) among Europe’s finest opening holes. That seems a bit excessive—I wouldn’t say it’s better than the opening holes at Royal County Down, Royal Portrush, or even Ardglass—but it is a very good opening hole. It’s ~420 yards, so the main issue here is not bailing too far away from the dunes on the inside of the dogleg to leave yourself a reasonable length second. But unlike several other greens on the front nine, this one is very accepting of a run-up shot if you do have to come in from some distance.

The 360 yard par 4 second is one of the most awkward holes here and was just downright unpleasant to play into a wind that was quartering from the left. From the tee, you can’t see much of the fairway, which narrows to almost nothing at about 240, and there’s all kinds of opportunity for losing balls up the right side. The smart play here is just to try to hit one 200-220 yards to hit the widest part of the fairway. The uphill approach is to a narrow green with junk on both sides.

The downhill par 3 third is straight-forward enough, with a deep back-to-front sloping green. A miss short is much better than one wide or long.

Like two, the ~540 yard par five fourth highlights my primary issue with Portstewart: several of the holes are just a bit too narrow, which will always be a problem on a links course where the wind is likely to blow. Although there wasn’t much excuse for it on the second, the major issue here is that the valley through which the fairway is routed just isn’t that wide. But they could probably cut a bit more grass at its edges. The green has a pretty good false front and you want to make sure that you get all the way up top.

Exiting the big dunes on the drive, the long par 4 fifth is a much sounder hole than the previous few. Actually, it’s a very good one; there’s ample room right but because of the length of the hole, you get a significant advantage if you hug the (more dangerous) left side. Still, you’ll probably be able to find and play your ball if you miss left.

The approach, through a gap in the dunes, is one of the course’s best. So is the deep but narrow green, which places a premium on accuracy for the long second.

Another weak point of Portstewart is its set of par 3s. None of them is very interesting, although they're all challenging. If it looks like your tee shot is coming up short, you’ll want to yell for it to get in one of the bunkers. Otherwise it’ll run about 20 yards down a hill and you’ll have a blind pitch.

The par 5 seventh features another awkward tee shot, especially if you’re not playing the back tees. From the (6,625 yard) white tees, it’s only about 250 to run through the fairway on the direct line and you’ll either have to lay back, hit a draw, or carry some of the dunes on the right.

But it gets more gimmicky on the approach, where you play uphill to a narrowing fairway that’s blind where you think you’d want to land the ball. You don’t want to land the ball there—just bunt one up near the furthest point you can see because beyond this, the fairway narrows to about 5 yards wide and the hole drops into a pit of doom on the right.

​It’s not a long par 5 and you’d think this would be an opportunity to have a short second, go for the green in two, and have a shot at eagle. But unless you’re very accurate, you’ll probably just lose 2 or 3 balls if you try to do this. This hole is probably best played 4-iron, 9-iron, wedge.

The 410 yard eighth is another awkward driving hole, running straight out about 300 yards to the end of the fairway, then turning sharply left over a ravine. It’s probably best to hit something about 250 and just take your mid-iron approach. Long hitters could get near the green with a favorable wind and that might be worth trying if you don’t care about your score but like most of the rest of the front nine, if you care about scoring, you should just play this hole conservatively.

Straight into the wind, the 350 yard ninth was absolutely brutal. That’s because unless you can carry it about 230, you’re driving to a narrow fairway with a pit of despair on either side. I couldn’t make the carry and hit it in the one on the right, which actually set up one of my best shots of the trip—an 8-iron that just barely cleared the crest of the hill and ended up 10 feet from the pin. It’d be an interesting hole with any other wind, but it was borderline unplayable with this one and we probably should have moved up a set of tees.

As I mentioned above, the character of the back nine is very different, crossing much more standard links terrain. And although I’m not sure how many would make it, there’s an argument to be made that this is the better of the two nines.

It isn’t always a lot easier—the 400 yard tenth features a drive to a narrow fairway with bunkers 230 and 265 on the left and dunes/long grass up the right. The approach is much easier, downhill to a broad green without any trouble in front.

The 375 yard eleventh plays to a broader fairway, although one progressively narrowed by bunkers up the left side. It’s definitely got a bit of a ‘championship course drive’ feel, wide open if you lay back but narrow if you hit a driver. The approach is over a valley to a green that’s cut into the side of a dune. There’s plenty of room up there which is good…because there isn’t really a good place to miss it.

We played the par 3 twelfth to a dopey temporary green left of the real green (without any reduction in the green fee). But the shot to the real green didn’t look to be anything special either.

The 490 yard par 5 thirteenth is pretty straight-forward, although there is OB up the right. The main feature here is a set of bunkers that narrows the fairway about 50 yards short of the green. They’re well-placed to mess with those who are on the cusp of being able to go for the green in two. The green has two bunkers on each side.

The fourteenth is also a par 5 and of similar length, but much more interesting and challenging. Like the seventh, it’s a quick dogleg right, where it’s easy to run through the fairway on the left. Again, you either have to lay back or hit something that can carry part of the dunes at the corner of the dogleg. But as we learned, it’s definitely possible to overdo this and end up in…another pit of despair, this time filled with deep grass where you’re unlikely to find the ball.

The rest of the hole runs gradually uphill across some lovely links terrain with a green set in a broad hollow in the dunes.

Fifteen might be the best par 3 of the bunch but I’m not sure that’s saying much. The green has bunkers front and right so again, it’s an exacting shot. But the par 3s all look and play similar.

I actually thought that the last three holes, lengthy par 4s running to, away from, and then back to the clubhouse might have been the strongest part of the course. Each is a solid hole and this part of the course feels like an Open Championship course, albeit maybe a bit easier off the tee.

Although there are no fairway bunkers, the sixteenth has a narrow fairway with dunes on both sides. The approach into the green is a good one—the green is open at the front and accepts a run up shot.

Also bunkerless off the tee (and at the green), the seventeenth is nonetheless significantly harder. Part of this was because it was playing into the wind (at 430, it’s also 40 yards longer). But a large part of it is the green itself, which is perched on a hill where anything short will roll back 10-15 yards. It might be the single hardest shot on the course although I appreciated the fact that unlike some of the course’s other hard shots, it’s easy to tell what’s going on here.

The bunkers up the left on the semi-blind eighteenth are only about a 190 yard carry and while there’s OB right, there’s plenty of room left. Downwind, it was a pretty simple driving hole. The approach looks similar to that on sixteen, although there are five bunkers around this green.

Portstewart appears to have become a standard part of the Northern Ireland golf trip itinerary. And some might see it as being in the upper tier of courses, maybe not on the level of Royal Portrush or Royal County Down, but in the conversation with courses like The Island and Portmarnock.

For me, this is not the case. First of all, I’d say there’s a pretty significant gap between Royal County Down and Royal Portrush, then another significant one between Royal Portrush and The Island/Portmarnock, which I’d rate similarly. I think that the drop off from The Island/Portmarnock to Portstewart is not much smaller than the drop off from Royal Portrush to The Island/Portmarnock.

To me, this is clearly a lesser course than those and belongs on the second (third?) tier with the lesser-known Portsalon and Narin and Portnoo. Several of the holes in the big dunes are awkward and honestly, a bit gimmicky. Some of this might have been the nature of the beast given the size of the dunes and narrowness of the corridors. But I’m sure that the course could have been routed or shaped in a way to avoid some of the awkwardness that we find on holes like two and eight.

And while I didn’t mention it much in my discussion of the holes, the shaping on and around the greens was often pretty rudimentary and not in a good way. A lot of the greens are awkwardly set in their surroundings, with abrupt changes in slope. This course might be a case where if they had moved more dirt, it would have looked like they had moved less. I don’t know who designed this course but in general, I think several architects could have done a better job.

This brings me to my last point, which is more a general reflection on my Ireland trip but one for which this course is a good case in point—except for the top courses, golf in Ireland does not offer good value for money. I paid £235 to play Portstewart, close to $300. If it were in the US, I’d say this was about a $150 course. And while Portstewart was one of the most egregious examples, green fees at all of these second-tier courses were at least close to if not over $200. That simply isn’t a good value for a course that would struggle to be in the top 10 public courses in my home state of Michigan, which Portstewart and everything below it would.

While you’d expect to pay a premium to travel abroad and might not mind doing so because these courses are a lot different that what you’ll get to experience in the states, if you care about getting your money’s worth for golf, I’d actually recommend avoiding the second-tier courses. Although some people scoff at it because of the amount of driving that it entails—Royal County Down to Ballybunion is almost a 5 hour drive—it might be best to stick to the top courses when visiting Ireland. Yes Royal County Down is $375, but it’s surely one of the world’s top 10 and is a much better value for money than Portstewart (or Narin and Portnoo or certainly Ballyliffin, which is the worst value of all).

Next time I go to Ireland—and someday I will because I ended this trip in Donegal and didn’t get to Ballybunion or Lahinch—I’ll be more sensitive to the green fees at these second-tier courses. On this trip, I tried to hit everything that seemed worth playing between Dublin and Donegal and there were just too many courses that I wouldn’t have missed had I not seen them. I might miss a gem (like Portsalon) along the way, but this would allow me to shorten my trip and not feel as if I had been had. Others may care more about the experience of the trip, but I expect a strong, positive correlation between the quality of the course and the green fee.

To me, Ireland has too many good, but not great courses charging visitors too high of greens fees. I’d much rather go play Pine Needles or Forest Dunes again than incur the considerable expense (plus the flight) to go play these. Or I’d go back to southwestern England, which (for now) is less well-known and offers better golf at lower rates.

After Royal County Down proved to be everything that I had hoped for and more, the next highlight on my Ireland/Northern Ireland trip (after Ardglass, which is very good but too expensive at £115) was the Dunluce Course at Royal Portrush, site of the 2019 Open Championship. Like many other golf fans, I enjoyed watching Shane Lowry defeat both the rest of the field and some nasty weather on his way to being the first Irishman to win the Open on (well, contested) Irish soil. Like other golf course fans, I had been especially excited to see Royal Portrush, a course that has always been ranked among the 25 or 30 in the world but was rarely the host of big events that could be seen on television.

One of the things that I noted while watching the Open is that the course seemed different from many of the other rota courses, with much more elevation change. Most links courses are largely flat, covering bumpy ground over sand dunes rather than properties with substantial slope. But while Royal Portrush is certainly a links course, with plenty of sand dunes and bumpiness, it also has substantial elevation change, with the first few holes running up and then down the side of a hill. This section of the property is unusual in my experience because it’s still links land, but on the side of a hill. I guess it’s not completely unprecedented though—Pennard in Wales, the ‘links in the sky’ has the same characteristics.

So the course has a different feel for championship links golf. I think it’s one that works in its favor—I thought that hilly opening stretch had some of the best holes. The rest of the course feels a bit more like other championship links courses, albeit a bit hillier. The other noteworthy thing about this course is that it has a pretty significant architectural pedigree, designed by (with the exception of 2 holes) Harry Colt. Many people point to the sophistication of Colt’s green complexes as an important part of the course’s excellent, including relative to its Northern Irish rival Royal County Down. As with other Colt courses, I didn’t find the interior contours to be outstanding—more interesting to me was the shaping at the edges of the greens. I also thought that the routing did an excellent job of presenting a variety of driving challenges, with the slope of the ground coming into play in a variety of ways.

While the Dunluce is undoubtedly one of the world’s best courses, I was not as wowed by it as I was Royal County Down. What stood out to me was how strong a test of golf this course was. It felt like a US Open course, requiring precise driving and placing strong demands on the iron game. But it’s a lot less quirky than County Down or some of the other top links courses that I’ve played, like Royal St. George’s or Rye. There aren’t any completely blind shots and there are no holes that feel strange and unique. That’s not to say that there aren’t any world-class holes—at least 3 of the 5 opening holes, plus 15 and 16 (the latter being the famous ‘Calamity’) qualify. But this relative lack of quirkiness meant that I didn’t feel quite the same affection for this course that I felt for Royal County Down or Royal St. George’s.


The par 4 first has become infamous as the place where native son Rory McIlroy ended his open hopes right from the beginning, hitting two balls OB (lining both sides of the fairway) on his way to making an 8. I’m not a fan of the OB, but I’m a big fan of this opening hole otherwise.
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From the standard white tees (6700 yards), the bunkers are about 250 and 270 out, so you can lay back and leave plenty of room (although not enough for Rory McIlroy…) or challenge them. It’s a pretty important choice and there’s good reason to go for the challenge because if you stay short of the bunkers, you’ll have a mid-iron up a pretty good hill. There’s plenty of room to run the ball onto this green, but it’s still a pretty tough approach with anything longer than about an 8-iron.

Not the easiest opening hole, but one of my favorites.

Another one of my favorites is the par 5 second, which is a tour de force of great bunkering. Most of the fairway bunkers are at the outside of the dogleg on the right, running from about 225-270. But the one that will get the most attention is on the left about 280 out. It’s perfectly placed for where long hitter will want to drive it, right on the optimal line to cut the corner.

The bunkering on the rest of the hole is excellent as well. It’s hard to see from the landing zone, but there’s a cluster of three bunkers in the left side of the fairway about 100 yards from the center of the green. You either need to carry them or play out to the right (I played the entire hole through the crap up the left side…). But if you’re up the right side of the fairway, you play the approach into the narrowest aspect of a green that runs away from you and down a hill off the edge.

This is one of the best par 5s that I’ve seen on a links course.

The third is a good-looking ~150 yard par 3, one that’s pretty unforgiving to wayward shots—all of its edges slope away.

The 440 yard fourth is another outstanding hole, possibly the best on the course. This is surely one of the world’s greatest driving hole, with two bunkers in the left side of the fairway from ~235-260 and OB right. There’s a decent amount of room between them and you should be able to fit a drive between them…but then again it’s OB and links pot bunker.

Still, you’ll have well over 200 yards in if you lay back so you’ll probably want to hit driver. If you do lay back, or if you go in one of the bunkers, you have to worry about crossing bunkers about 100 yards short of the green. Although it’s a bit of an ask because it puts you closer to the OB, it’s best to be up the right side of the fairway to open up an angle into this green, which sits in a dell in the dunes.

It’s a great looking green, the perfect finish for a truly outstanding hole.

Another outstanding hole is the short par 4 fifth, playing down off the hill toward the sea. While much of the fairway is off to the left, unless the wind is unfavorable, most will take a line either directly at the green or at the fairway bunker on the left, probably 275 out. It’s actually a pretty easy driving hole because it’s probably only a 220 carry (downhill) on the line right between the two bunkers.

Still, even if you hit a good drive, there’s plenty of trouble. The green is probably the wildest on the course, narrow, with a big tier in the middle, and with ridges feeding into the putting surface at the edges. You’d better get your approach fairly close here because there’s a good chance of a 3-putt from anywhere outside of 30 feet.

The par 3 sixth is kind-of similar looking to the third, although it’s about 30 yards longer and the green is more receptive. You really don’t want to be short here.

The par 5 seventh is the first of consecutive new, non-Colt holes. They’re on land that was previously part of the neighboring Valley Course but was claimed for the Dunluce for the Open to provide an alternative to the less sexy seventeenth and eighteenth, which also had less room for gallery flow.

There’s no doubt that the seventh is an attractive hole. But it’s a pretty simple driving hole. And while there’s some interesting with the crossing dunes between 80 and 120 yards short of the green, apparently these have been ‘softened’ (they cut down the one on the left) to prevent balls from collecting in one spot in the fairway.

To me, the additional blindness on the approach and that fact that you needed to carry the dunes to avoid landing in divots would have been a virtue—that would have forced a decision as to whether to try to carry the dunes for someone who hit a short or a poor drive. The approach still kind of works because of the encroachment of the dune on the right, but the additional bit of quirkiness wouldn’t have hurt because it’s one thing that’s lacking here relative to other links courses.

Of the two new (Mackenzie and Ebert) holes, I preferred the 410 yard, dogleg left eighth, which is a very demanding driving hole. Here you have to thread one between (or lay up short of) a bunker ~250 out on the right and nasty dunes and long grass left. The green is still approachable enough if you decide to lay back.

Nine is a bit similar from the tee with bunkers right and long grass left but this time, the fairway slopes to the right. Reverse camber fairways will be a running theme on the back nine and are a big part of the reason why this felt like a US Open course to me—it’s very demanding off the tee.

If you pull off a good drive here though, the approach isn’t too difficult. The bunkers short of the green are a good 20 yards short and the green is large and receptive. Just don’t be above the hole.

Ten is a par 4 of around 380 yards (but 460 from the Open tees) but again, is quite challenging off the tee. It doesn’t look like a reverse camber fairway but it is because the part that you’re driving to is not the part that you see, it’s the area right of it…which slopes away into the left rough. This might actually be an easier driving hole from the championship tees because you’d be driving into the visible part of the fairway.

But the second certainly wouldn’t be easier from there. Like the fourth, the green sits in a dell in the dunes. But this one is much narrower. The ridges at its edges give all kinds of opportunities to feed the ball toward the hole without aiming at it and I remember this being one of the most fun holes to watch in the open. It’s arguably the best green on the course.

The next two holes are par 5s for regular play although at 475 from the tips, eleven played as a par 4 in the Open. The hole doglegs softly right around the dunes on the right side and apparently everyone was cutting this corner during the Open. Since it’s at least a 260 yard carry to do this, the rest of us should aim out to the left, where there’s plenty of room.

The green site is lovely and it’s clear what you don’t want to do: come up short. If you do, you’ll come a good 20 yards back and 10-15 feet down. Unless the pin is in the front, the shot from there isn’t so hard but still, take enough club on the approach because there’s plenty of room up there.

Twelve is a more difficult driving hole, with bunkers encroaching into the right side of the fairway progressively from about 225-300. The entire run into the green is open and the green feels similar to the eleventh, although with a softer false front. The bigger danger here is missing right because the green is built up high here. It’s another very fine green complex.

I thought that the two par 3s on the front were just ok. The two on the back are much better. The downhill 160 yard thirteenth has a cool view through the green up the seventeenth fairway. It’s not an outstanding hole; the two on the front are more demanding. But it looks good and that counts for something.

The 385 yard fourteenth might be the most demanding par 4 on the course. There are bunkers on both sides of the fairway in the driving zone and even nastier rough if you miss left. The green is probably the course’s most difficult to hit; narrow and running off both sides. I generally don’t like tabletop greens with runoffs on all sides and this one is probably a bit much. But still, it’s a lot better to miss right than left and short is better than both, so that gives something to consider when thinking about where to hedge.

The fourteenth has the most difficult green to hit and the fifteenth might have the most difficult fairway to hit, at least from the lower left-hand tees. This is another reverse camber fairway, with the hole doglegging left and the fairway running off to the right. As should be pretty clear by now, Royal Portrush really favors someone who can work the ball off the tee, especially someone who can work a draw.

This is another excellent green complex; narrow and deep, with a runoff on the right of just the right depth and length. More than any other links course I’ve seen, a lot of care was put into the shaping of the edges of these greens. They have a lot of interesting small slopes and runoffs. They’re not the same as Pinehurst no. 2, where the green edges just run off; these have a lot more shaping in them and don’t always repel balls.

I can see why this course has a reputation for superb green complexes. These green edges show more sophistication than any other Colt course that I’ve played.

Sixteen is the famous ‘Calamity’ and it’s every bit as good as they say: 200 yards over a deep hollow on the right, but with room and slopes left that enable a clever (and accurate) golfer to feed a ball onto the green from that side. The green is large however and there’s plenty of room to hit one up there and keep it on. Always, but on this hole especially, golfers would be advised to take one club extra.

Seventeen is a bit of an odd hole: a par 4 of around 360 yards where the fairway drops about 30 feet down a hill probably 250 yards out. With a favorable wind, most good drivers should be able to get pretty close to the green and a lot of players were driving it during the Open. But whatever you do, don’t miss left from the tee.

If you have some distance, you might want to move back a tee block on the 425 yard eighteenth because it’s pretty easy to drive it through the fairway on the left and there’s very little room where the fairway turns right at about 250 yards. The approach is to a fairly large, open green.

Even before it hosted the Open, there could have been little doubt that the Dunluce Course at Royal Portrush was exceptionally well suited for the job. It has every kind of challenge that a good championship course should have without overdoing any of them: challenging driving with variety from shot-to-shot, challenging green complexes that especially punish misses on the wrong side, plenty of testing elements (rain, wind…probably hail sometimes). It certainly identified the best golfer during that week in July 2019 and will do it again. I look forward to watching future Opens here. It’s certainly among the most appealing Open venues.

But in this rarified air of the top 50 golf courses in the world, a strength can be a weakness. The Dunluce is always a solid test, but is not a surprising one. If you read my review of Royal County Down, you’ll see at how I marvel at the originality of so many of the holes and at the boldness of how they cross that spectacular piece of property. There’s no doubt that Colt’s routing here is excellent, but it also doesn’t produce the Wow! moments that you experience repeatedly at Royal County Down.

Now part of this is because the landscape isn’t as dramatic here. There are no 50 foot high sand hills that Colt had no choice but to require us to shoot over blindly. But whether because of the land itself or the design, it produces fewer dramatic moments. More than that, there aren’t any holes here—even though there are several that are world class—that surprise me and feel like something that I couldn’t find anywhere else in the world of golf. To me, that’s something almost essential for a links course to have. Links properties probably have the most character of any type of property and I feel that architects should, at least once in awhile, deliver something that’s a bit strange, that makes you scratch your head in a positive way.

There’s nothing head-scratching about Royal Portrush. And while there’s a lot to be said for that—it’s probably more likely that an odd feature ends up being bad than good—it’s also something I feel that I should always see on a links course. It’s not to Royal Portrush’s detriment that it doesn’t have this, but it is something that for me, keeps it a little bit behind my favorite links courses.

It probably goes without saying that Royal County Down was going to be one of the highlights of my Ireland/Northern Ireland trip. It’s probably the course on the island that’s most consistently rated in the top 10 in the world. Many well-travelled people think it’s the best course in the world and I’ve seen it at the top of some lists. It’s certainly a course that shows well in pictures, crossing huge sand dunes and with mountains as the background. In short, for most people taking a golf trip to Ireland, it’s probably at the top of the agenda.

Yet I had a strong suspicion that I wasn’t going to like Royal County Down as much as all of that suggested I should because there’s another aspect to the course’s reputation: it’s very difficult. The course is notorious for blind shots; there are at least a half dozen from the tee and likely many more depending on where you drive the ball. And on many courses that run between large sand dunes, the space between them often isn’t wide enough to hit to reliably, especially when the wind is blowing…which is almost a guarantee on courses that run through large sand dunes. Just see my review of The Island from a few days earlier for an example of this. I was a bit concerned that the course was going to be a bit much and that its beauty might outpace its soundness.

So I was thrilled to see that there was no merit to my concerns. Yes, there are a lot of blind shots. Yes, the course is hard. But I thought that the elements of the course were so well balanced in terms of difficulty. With almost every blind drive, there’s ample room to hit to on the other side. The one hole where there isn’t is a short par 4. We were playing in a pretty good crosswind, yet I always felt that if you were smart about your aiming points (with the assistance of your forecaddie, which is absolutely essential here on a first trip around), you could get away will misses. You do need to drive your ball reasonably well here. If you’re having a very wayward day with the driver, you will lose balls. But the course is not as exacting off the tee as I feared.

But the other part of the balance is the greens. I’ve seen several people downgrade this course relative to Royal Portrush because that course has better greens. I disagree and for a very fundamental reason: you can’t assess a course’s greens independent of the rest of the course. A course may have a really wild set of greens but if the course is also very difficult from tee to green, I would say that its a worse set of greens than if you had the same greens on a course that was tamer from tee to green. The most important thing is how well balanced all of the elements are.

And the balance between the tee to green difficulty and the greens at Royal County Down is perfect. The greens are not very undulating and a lot of them give you some room to miss at their edges. But there’s also usually a side that’s no good. Approaches still require thinking, but for the most part, a miss won’t mean disaster (with a few exceptions). Maybe if you just limit your assessment of Royal County Down and Royal Portrush to their greens, you’d say that Royal Portrush has a better set. But Royal Portrush is also tamer from tee to green, so that’s reasonable. There’s no doubt in my mind that if Royal County Down had a ‘great’ set of greens, like Augusta National or Oakland Hills, it’d be too much and the course wouldn’t be as good.

How about the individual holes? I’ll leave most of that discussion for the holes themselves. But there are many great ones. And what I love about this course is how original a lot of the holes are. The front nine is the more famous and everyone agrees that it’s full of great holes but to me, some of the best of the best come on the back nine. And that’s because of how well they use some unusual land features. That’s the story of Royal County Down; it’s an incredible, challenging piece of land and the holes express that perfectly. They’re challenging and the best are highly original. There are no templates here and the only reason that this course isn’t the source of template holes is that it’d be so difficult to recreate these features.


Now onto the holes themselves. The opener, a ~520 yard par 5, is almost perfect for its job. In what will be a theme for the course, there’s plenty of room off the tee…unless you hit a really bad drive. For short hitters, the main thing to avoid here is a large, heather-covered on the left side. For long hitters, it’s running through into the dunes on the right.

The approach is blind and if you’re laying up, you’ll want to keep it about 100 yards from the green. The fairway narrows here between low dunes that follow it to the green. But the club has done a good job of maintaining these smaller dunes in the rough near the line of play. You can run your ball onto the green here but if you’re inaccurate, it will get caught up at the sides. Still, it’s open around the green and these shots should be playable.

This was the best opening hole on my Ireland trip and is on the short list of best opening holes that I've played.

The par 4 second gives you the full RCD experience. It’s as blind a drive as you’ll ever see. I don’t want to give the impression that the course is not without severity; unless you can get within about 180 yards of the green here, the fairway is a narrow tongue with a heather-covered dune on the left and a dune/drop-off on the right. But past this point, it’s wide open. It’d take a few plays to learn how to do it, but it’d be best to be up the right here because a dune short-left of the green obscures approaches from the left.

This hole reminds me of an important, practical point: make sure you select the correct set of tees here. There are five sets, but the second are still 6,250 yards, which is plenty enough unless you’re a mid-single-digit handicap. We played the third set, the 6,675 yellows and really, you shouldn’t go any further back unless you’re a 2-handicap or less.

The 450 yard third doesn’t not have a blind drive, but it’s certainly one of the more difficult holes. But the drive is actually pretty easy. It was only about 200 to carry the bunkers on the left and past this, the fairway is almost endlessly wide for the next 100 yards. The fairway is cut off at about 280 and the closer you can drive it to this, the clearer view you’ll have of the approach.

The approach is narrow between about 160 and 75 yards short of the green so you’ll need to be accurate if you need to use this space. But then it opens back up and while there are some bunkers to the sides, the green is open and relatively flat. This hole exemplifies the balance that I noted in my intro.

Most who know a bit about RCD before playing it have seen pictures of the ~200 yard par 3 fourth. It’s one of the most spectacular holes, especially with the gorse in bloom.

But if you put a massive black curtain around the entire hole, it’d still be an excellent par 3. It’s incorrect to say that the greens here are uninteresting and this is one of the interesting ones (apparently Colt did a few of the greens here and I’d bet this was one of them). The green is built up slightly from its surroundings, but more at the back than at the front. There’s more room to run the ball onto the green than you can see from the tee so it’s best to hedge to the front, which leaves a simple uphill pitch or putt.

When we were putting on the second green, a ball sailed right through us to the far side of the green. Where could it have come from? That’d be the fifth tee, which begins a 400 yard, reverse camber, dogleg right par 4…where the second green is about 260 yards out, just left of the fairway. It’s more directly in the line of fire than almost any green I’ve seen (one of the guys in our group hit it too).

One knock I’ve seen of RCD is that there are far more holes that favor a fade off the tee than a draw. That’s probably true overall, although not to a troubling degree. But it’s certainly true here. Probably most should club down off this tee and you definitely should if you’re not comfortable hitting a fade.

While the drive is tough, the green is open in front with simple surroundings. So the hole is a bit awkward, but again, the challenge is balanced.

I’d say the same thing for the short par 4 sixth, our next blind drive. This is the narrowest of the blind drives, with about 50 yards of width out to about 250, but then narrowing on the left. The hole is only about 360 though, so the sensible play is something you can hit 230-250. There is an advantage to driving it further because the green is narrow with a pretty good drop-off on the left. And you’ll be aided in trying to hit it past 250 by the concave slope of the fairway. But you’d better not pull it if you go for this shot…maybe you’ll find my playing partner Greg’s ball if you do.

This hole exemplifies the balance in Royal County Down. It's a short par 4, but the fairway is one of the narrowest and the green is one of the toughest to hit.

Seven is a well-liked short par 3. The first part of that—obviously—is the surroundings. But I think another part is the green complex. It’s very well-conceived. It places a premium on accuracy because if you miss to the left side, your ball will roll off the green. But this shot isn’t too difficult. What you really don’t want to do is go long.

The front nine closes with two exceptional par 4s. The drive on the 420 yard eighth is quite a bit more open than appears, with only about a 205 yard carry over the bunkers on the right, no trouble beyond, and about another 85 yards to the bunker on the left.

So the drive shouldn’t be too hard but it’s important that you hit a good one because the green, at least if you get aggressive, requires a precise shot. The first challenge is a pair of dunes that narrow the approach to about 20 yards 20 yards short of the green. Navigating these will be a challenge for a long approach. But unless you’ve bombed your drive, it’s best to hedge short because the green is otherwise open in front and narrows to the back…with drop-offs on both sides. Unless you’ve got a wedge in your hands, the target here should never be more than a few feet onto the green.

This is one of the great long par 4 approach shots that I’ve seen.

Certainly the most famous hole of them all here is the 425 yard ninth. It starts with one of the most unusual-looking drives that I’ve seen. You’ve got about 150 yards up a hill then the hole just drops off to God-knows-where. It’s a bit too much to take in in one play, but I think this is an exceptional driving hole. The aiming post—just right of the caddy in this picture—is the perfect line. There’s a pretty good amount of room right of that too, but you don’t want to miss too far right because it will make the approach much longer and much more difficult.

So maybe you want to cut a little to the inside on the left? You’d better be precise if you do that because there’s a nasty, heather-covered dune just left of the fairway from 200-240. If you can carry it further than that, you should bomb away.

Like eight, it’s very important to hit a good drive here because the approach is much harder from long distance than short distance. If you’ve hit a weak drive off to the right, you might have trouble carrying a dune and a duo of bunkers that cuts off the fairway about 30 yards short of the green. If you have hit a good drive, it’s better to miss short than wide because there are drop-offs at the side of the green.

This is one of those cases where a hole that has a reputation as one of the world’s greatest completely deserves it.

Ten is a bit of a change of pace—it’s all right there in front of you. Still, it’s about 190 yards and there’s some nasty stuff if you miss wide. There’s no trouble at all short.

The completely blind drive on eleven is a bit like that on six, although there’s a lot more room to miss…which is appropriate because the hole is at least 30 yards longer (and much longer if you play the whites or blacks). It’s one of the most straight-forward holes so far, with a large, receptive green.

The second nine is inland and the terrain is not as severe here as the front. But I don't agree at all that's it's vastly inferior. The course adds new challenges where the visibility is a bit better off the tee, like numerous fairway bunkers on the par 5 twelfth. This hole favors a draw although as long as you can carry it more than 220, the’s a good amount of room to miss right. Still, the green should be very much in range if you hit a good drive and keep it up the left side because it’s only about 480 from the yellow tees.

While the front nine gets top billing because it’s just great hole after great hole, two of the best holes of them all are on the back. The first of these is the 425 yard par 4 thirteenth, which just might be my favorite. What an exceptional driving hole this is; the fairway is very wide until about 230 yards (from the yellows), where the right side is cut off by a massive dune. But the fairway isn’t completely cut off; it turns left and continues through about a 25 yard wide opening between this dune and gorse on the left. So you can either lay up out to the right and have a completely blind (and long) approach or try to work one into the opening on the left. To those who say this course favors fades, probably the best way to do this is to sling a draw off the dune.

It’s possible, but you have to hit a very good drive here to get a view of the green, probably something close to 300. Still, the green complex is exceptionally well-designed for a difficult approach. There’s open space everywhere (except long) and if you’ve laid up off the tee, it’s possible to run one in down the hill from the right. It’s also possible to use this slope to feed one onto the green if you’re up the left but still have a long approach.

In short, this green is perfectly designed for the long approach that most will have. This hole is on the short list of best longer par 4s that I’ve seen.

The character of Royal County Down changes a bit for the last five holes as we play near the boundary of the property, next to farmland. The 200 yard par 3 fourteenth has an unusual backdrop of pine trees, but it’s a very nice hole in its own right with a green that has some pretty good pitch from back-right to front-left.

The other truly great hole on the back nine is the very tough 450 yard par 4 fifteenth. I’m almost a bit hesitant to call this a top tier great hole because it’s so difficult, almost certainly the toughest on the course.

From the yellow tees, it’s only about 240 to run through the fairway at the gorse in the distance (the gorse is probably about 260. There’s also a bit of room at the right edge of the gorse if you go too far, but you really don’t want to go too far right as the fairway slopes off into a pretty deep hollow. The approach into the green is wide open, which again is appropriate after such a difficult drive. But there’s also much bigger trouble than around the greens on some of the other tough holes, with another deep hollow right of the green.

I think this hole might be slightly improved by widening the strip of fairway that connects the landing area and the approach. There’d still be a lot of risk in trying to drive it here because you’d have to challenge the hollow on the right. Still, the drive and the approach are both very interesting as is and enough to me to make this a great hole.

The last three holes have always received a lot of criticism for being out of character with the rest of the course. I guess they must have thought the old sixteenth a really big problem because they build a completely new hole, a par 4 of about 320 yards.

I don’t know about the old one, but I liked this one a lot. First of all, there haven’t been any holes of this length so far, so it adds variety to the course. Second, it works well as a drivable par 4. It’s probably a 220-240 carry over the first (hidden) fairway bunker on the right and there’s a lot of trouble if you go for it and miss right of that. But if you lay up, the fairway isn’t so wide and you can’t fall asleep on it. The green also has some decent front-to-back slope, so you must control your approach shot. The bunkers are maybe a bit out-of-character with the rest of the course but the bones of this hole are very solid.

Seventeen, a 400 yard par 4 has always come gotten criticism for the weird hazard in the middle of the fairway about 120 yards from the center of the green. It used to be a pond but they’ve converted it into a very attractive waste bunker. It’s odd because it doesn’t really look like anything else on the course and it’s completely blind from the tee, but it’s possible for long hitter to try to go around it on the left or carry the edge (you’d have to be really familiar with the lines of the tee to do that).

​For the rest of us, it’s an easy drive followed by a short iron or wedge uphill to a large, undulating green. Maybe it was a lot worse when it was a pond but as it is now, I don’t see what the complaining is about. It’s an easy driving hole on a course that has very few of them. Why is that bad?

The par 5 eighteenth crosses the flattest ground on the course. So revisions (I think mostly by Donald Steel) have upped the challenge by adding fairway bunkers—18 in total, which must be 20-30% of the total bunkers on the course. It’s not a complicated drive but it is a demanding one. And I’d recommend a conservative play on the second; the fairway narrows between bunkers about 120 yards out and you might want to leave it short of this for safety. I like this hole because there’s a lot of trouble if you play it aggressively but you can really reduce that if you think your way around it and place your shots.

I came into Royal County Down with some doubts that I would regard it as highly as those whose votes comprise the world rankings. But I left without any doubt that it is as good as those who love it say it is. I haven’t seen enough of the contenders to make a judgment, but I’d doubt that this isn’t one of the world’s ten best courses. Among courses that I’ve played, it’s one of only two (the other being Pinehurst no. 2) that, for me, scores a perfect 10. It does it in almost the opposite way—with incredible tee-to-green variety and spectacular visuals—but it’s the only course I’ve seen whose hole-for-hole strength compares. And actually, as I’ve noted several times, there are a lot of outstanding green complexes too. The green contours aren’t too heavy, but that’s clearly a strength given all the other difficulties.

While every hole is good to world-class in its own right, Royal County Down has an additional element which, now having played a lot of the best modern courses, I’m realizing is very important for me: there’s a lot that’s unusual. There’s a lot that you’d never build this way if you could avoid it and certainly never with a blank slate. Much of it is all the blind tee shots that still work because there’s enough landing area on the other side. But it’s also the way holes work around hills and hollows (13, 15), and holes where the elements dot the landscape in almost a random way that make for something both interesting and very original (3). Plus the few holes with less natural oddness in the way fill in with interesting green complex shaping (7, 8) or turn up the challenge with a bunch of bunkers (18). The course is an almost-perfect mix of the hand of God and the hand of man.

One caveat about my assessment of this as one of the greatest driving courses: I did have what was for me a very good day off the tee. The holes going out were in a 10-15 mile-per-hour left-to-right wind, which is a very comfortable wind for me—I was able to aim left and swing soft, letting the wind carry the ball back into the fairways. There’s an important lesson there for anyone playing this course—don’t try to do too much from the tee. Pick a set of tees that’s comfortable for you and use the wind (and your forecaddie) to your advantage. A few holes will play long but for the most part, the course doesn’t require length. It’s a course where you can throttle back and think your way around. But there’s a lot that’s unknown standing on the tee for the first time, so more than any course I’ve seen, I’d recommend getting a yardage book and a forecaddie and asking the forecaddie a lot of questions about lines and distances.

The great Northern Ireland golf question is: Royal County Down or Royal Portrush. For me, it’s an easy call for the former. Royal Portrush is excellent, but it doesn’t have anywhere near the variety or unusualness of Royal County Down. It’s probably a better course for a big tournament, but that doesn’t rank to highly on my list of important factors. For me, Royal County Down is the pinnacle of big-dunes links golf. Anyone who loves golf and is near Dublin or Belfast should try to play it…but make sure you call several months in advance. As tough as the course is, it’s even tougher to get a tee time.

Of all of the courses that I played from Dublin to Donegal, perhaps the one with the richest tournament pedigree is Portmarnock. Royal Portrush may have hosted the Open in 1951 and 2019—and will probably host it several more times—but Portmarnock has been hosting European Tour events continuously over the decades and, talking with people at the club, it seems that many of the tour’s past stars are a pretty common presence here. Plus, being less than 20 minutes drive from the capital city, it’s the Republic’s premier club. If the R&A were ever to hold the Open outside of the United Kingdom, I’d imagine that this would be the first place to go.

And having played the course, it’d be exactly the kind of course for it. It’s difficult, with narrow fairways and a good number of fairway bunkers demanding accurate driving, especially if the rough is up. But there’s not much quirky or unfair about it. There are fewer blind shots than most links courses I’ve played. And while a few of the greens have some pretty severe drop-offs at the edges, most are straight-forward. Like any links course, it wouldn’t be too easy to work your way around it if the wind is really blowing. But there are far fewer opportunities for lost balls and disasters than on my previous day’s course, The Island. Portmarnock’s challenge is fair and it’s a course that you can play well the first time you play it, if you’re on.

While I appreciate all of that and found the course preferable (if only slightly) to The Island because of it, it’s also the reason I don’t have the affection for Portmarnock that I have for many other links courses. I’ve heard people say similar thinks about Hoylake and Royal Birkdale—that they’re great tournament courses but a bit lacking in character—but I never got up to northern England. The links courses that I did play in England—Royal St. George’s, Rye, St. Enodoc—no one would accuse them of lacking character. And I guess that for a links course to be in my top tier, it has to be a little gritty. It has to have some blind shots and unusual holes. This can be overdone—and some of my favorite links courses certainly overdo it from time to time—but it’s that naturalness, that feeling-rugged-in-a-rugged landscape that I love about links golf. Not to sound too critical, but Portmarnock feels a bit Robert Trent Jones in comparison to a Deal or a Royal St. George’s.

A few practical comments about the place: one, it’s incredibly expensive. I was strongly encouraged to take a caddy (and he was a great guy so I’m glad I did), but the day ended up costing me well over $500. If you’re at all budget conscious and don’t care about checking world ranking boxes, you might want to skip Portmarnock. Also, there are 27 holes here and if you’re going to play, you should play all of them. There isn’t a noticeable difference in quality between the third nine and the main 18, except that the routing is a bit awkward at times because these holes are shoehorned around the originals.

Championship Course

To avoid getting stuck behind four balls as a single, I played Portmarnock in the convoluted order 10-18, 19-27, 1-9, but I’ll review the course in the traditional order 1-18, 19-27. The first is a very good par 4 opener, with three bunkers on the left progressively narrowing the fairway out to about 275 and the estuary (?) on the other side. If you’re playing the proper set of tees, each of Portmarnock’s three opening holes is medium-short par 4 and it’d be sensible to lay back here for accuracy. The green is open in front and slopes gently away at the back.

The second is only about 360 from the whites but has something of a recurring feature—you drive into an open area, but the fairway is only in part of that area so the aim point is a bit deceiving. Here it’s probably at the right edge of the bunkers right of the green. Anything up the left can get stuck in rough which wasn’t too high when I played in late April, but which my caddie told me can get pretty nasty.

Three is another sub-400 yard par 4 and is probably the property’s most awkward hole, doglegging left around the fifth green and some nasty rough, with the estuary curving up along its entire right side. On this day, the estuary was dry and you wouldn’t get in too much trouble if you drove it in there. Still, when my caddie handed me the driver, I put it back in the bag and took out my 2-hybrid. There’s no need to hit anything longer than about 225 here anyway.

Four is the first ‘tough’ hole, a par 4 of around 450 yards. Obviously it’s a challenging drive with bunkers everywhere. But the course’s first really interesting shot is the approach, to a green that’s partially-to-completely blocked by a dune if you drive it up the left side. The right side of the fairway gives you a clear view and an open angle into the green…but that’s also where most of the bunkers are. It’s a very good hole.

The drive on the par 4 fifth might be the course’s quirkiest, blind over two dunes. But it isn’t a particularly difficult one; it’s pretty flat and open on the other side. The approach to the green is similar in character to the first three.

Six is a very long par five with staggered bunkers in the driving zone, first right then left. It’s a fairly standard bunkering scheme for this course, which is not excessively bunkered off the tee, but usually gives you a few on both sides of the fairway that you have to work between. There’s a hidden pond in the left rough that runs to about 100 yards short of the green so it’s best to hedge a bit right with your layup.

It takes until the seventh to reach our first par 3 (there are only 3 on the Championship Course), but it’s a lovely one. It also has some interesting interior contours from what I remember…although apparently not interesting enough for me to take a picture of them.

I found the again, sub-400 yard par 4 eighth to be one of the most frustrating holes on the course, but not in a bad way. Like two, it’s a bit unclear where most of the fairway is; it’s actually further right of where you think. And I think it’s especially important here that you’re up the right side because the green is deep, narrow, and angled toward the right side…and has severe drop-offs on the right and in the back. There’s also a rise and a bunker short-left of the green, so it’s very difficult to hit and hold the green from the left rough. I made a mess of this hole but I think that if you played it correctly, it shouldn’t be too bad.

Definitely one of the most interesting, and I think probably one of the best holes in the 27.

Nine is another long, stern par 4 with staggered fairway bunkers, first at ~240 on the right, then ~280 on the left. Perhaps the pattern is getting a bit repetitive by this point, but hey, it’s a championship course. The approach is over a ditch about 50 yards short of the green and the green complex has some good contour both on the approach and on the surface.

The back nine starts with a hole that shouldn’t be too difficult…as long as you can hit a wedge. It’s only about 360, so it’s probably best to lay up where the fairway narrows at the left bunker (about 260). The green is very reminiscent of a Pinehurst green, with run-offs on all sides. Missing short isn’t too bad, the sides are slightly worse, and long is…terrible. Like most of Pinehurst’s greens, the domed shape is intimidating to hit to, but there should be enough room up there given the length of the hole. It’s a good one.

Eleven is a pretty straight-forward par 4 of just over 400 yards. There are some bunkers (and gorse) up the right, but there’s no trouble left unless the rough is up. It’s a basic approach to a flat green with bunkers at the front right and left.

The par 3 twelfth is definitely not a basic approach to a flat green. It probably has the most interior contour of any green in the 27 holes. It’s only about 150 yards and if the pin is on the deeper left side of the green, it shouldn’t be too hard. But if they tuck the pin at the far right as on this day…just play to the middle-left and take the long putt. There’s a little dip behind the green and you’ll have (as I learned) a very touchy shot if you hit it there. Another fine hole.

A bit like the eighteenth hole at the next course I’m going to review, Royal Country Down, the architects didn’t have much to work with in the flat expanse of land that is the par 5 thirteenth fairway. So they just put about 9 fairway bunkers out there on both sides. And it’s the same thing (maybe even more bunkers) for about the last 75 yards of the hole. Still, I think it works because it’s a reachable par 5 and there’s nothing wrong with cranking up the challenge for those who go for the green in two.

The middle of the back nine and the third nine get into the northern part of the property, which has a bit more elevation change that adds a bit of variety. My caddie Joe told me that Tiger Woods once drove the green on the ~400 par 4 fourteenth (I’m assuming it was downwind although for today’s long hitters, it wouldn’t even have to be). The rest of us should try to avoid the cluster of 3 bunkers from ~240-260 on the left. It’s a beautiful uphill approach to a green that’s deeper than it appears.

The par 3 fifteenth is Portmarnock’s most famous hole and for good reason; it’s located on the best links land, next to the ocean. And it has one of the course’s more difficult-to-hit greens. There’s plenty of depth but it’s pretty narrow. Be sure to use it and don’t mess with front pins. Or you might just wreck what had been a very good round…

Sixteen is another par 5 and it’s very similar to thirteen, with bunkers on both sides of the fairway, but not as many. The difference here is that there are also crossing bunkers. But at 150 yards short of the green, they shouldn’t be an issue unless you’ve hit a bad drive. While this green had a pleasant cant to the back-right, I’d say that overall, the par 5s aren’t a strength of Portmarnock.

The last two holes are long, tough par 4s…especially in a pouring rain. Normally, the main driving hazard here would be two bunkers about 240 out on the left. But I couldn’t reach them in this rain…I was more worried about carrying the two at about 200 yards on the right.

The heavily bunkered approach is probably one of the course’s best. A cluster of four bunkers pinches the approach at about 40 yards short of the green. Once you clear this gap, the ground slopes gently forward toward the green. I like this concept because if you’re someone who probably can’t carry your approach to the green (which at 450 from the whites is probably most of us), there’s a premium on a straight drive because it would be difficult to run one through the gap and onto the green if you’ve missed the fairway. It makes for an awkward angle.

There seems to be some local pride in the 390 yard (450 from the tips) finisher and I think justly so. This time, there are only bunkers up the right side of the fairway, but the fairway turns right around them and being too far to the left can result in an obscured approach over gorse. The green is large, but elevated and requires a well-struck approach.

I made some slightly disparaging comments about Portmarnock in my intro (comparing something to Robert Trent Jones has become quite the insult in golf architecture circles lately…), but as should be pretty clear, it has a lot to recommend it. There’s always a lot to be said for a course that’s a tough, but fair test of golf. Portmarnock is certainly that throughout. And there are several holes with a lot of character, including the opener, 4, 8, 10, 12, 15, and 17. That’s more than a third of the holes. I certainly haven’t played a Trent Jones course with 7 noteworthy holes. Also, this is one of the best conditioned courses that I’ve ever played, with almost pure fescue fairways and greens.

Still, I wouldn’t put Portmarnock in my top tier of links courses because (1) it doesn’t have enough interesting terrain, (2) few holes have the green complexes to make up for this, (3) the bunker scheme is a bit repetitive, and (4) it lacks variety in its mix of holes. There’s very little of the bumpiness that I associate with my favorite links courses like Royal St. George’s or Deal here. Many players (especially good ones) might like that because it reduces the randomness of the bounces. But to me, that gets swamped by the loss of character that it entails. This would be a good place for some more challenging green complexes, with drop-offs and/or heavy interior contour. But with the exception of a few complexes (8, 10, 12), the greens are fairly tame.

The course could also use a bit of a rethink of its bunker scheme. I don’t think anyone would be too offended if the fairway bunkering was redone to include a few some diagonal carry bunkers or clusters of bunkers in the middle of the fairway. I also think that aesthetically, the course would benefit from some different bunker styles. Almost all of the bunkers here are the small and round pot variety. The course could use a few like the Hell Bunker at St. Andrew’s to break up the landscape.

Finally the mix of holes, with only 3 par 3s and 3 par 5s is a weakness. The course feels like a procession of mid-long par 4s. The shortish par 4s come mostly in the first 3 holes, but even those aren’t that short from the championship tees (each is in the low 400s). The course could sorely use a few shorter par 4s, although I suppose they could move the tees up a few blocks on ten and that’d become easily drivable.

I don’t make top 100 lists because I haven’t played enough courses around the world. But I suspect that it would fall well short if I did. I’d have it well behind the top links and heathland courses that I played in England, as well as both Royal Portrush and Royal County Down. Still, if you’re going to be near Dublin and you’ve got a big budget, I’d definitely recommend playing Portmarnock.
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Holes 19-27

And if those are both true, you might as well play all of the holes because the third nine is of pretty much the same caliber as the original 18. This is because it has several holes in the northern part of the property near the famous fifteenth on the Championship Course, including a drivable par 4 that might be the best hole on the property.
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But the nineteenth is a pretty dull opener, probably over the flattest part of the property. It was long into the wind at 420 but as long as you don’t hit a big hook into the pond on the left, you should be ok.

But you quickly get the sense with the twentieth hole that the nineteenth isn’t indicative of the rest of the course. This is a very nice ~390 yard par 4 with a ridge running down the left side of the fairway that will kick anything over there into the left rough. The approach is also good looking, to a green with a slight false front.

Twenty-one reminds me a bit of a mirror-image of the twelfth on the big course (just to its left), except with a less severe green. You probably shouldn’t go at left pins, but there’s a bit more room here than with right pins on the big course twelfth.

Twenty-two is a type of hole that the big course is sorely lacking: a drivable par 4. And this one isn’t drivable as in Rory McIlroy can drive it; it’s only about 280 from the tips. But it’s also quite narrow, turning right in the last 50 yards. If you’ve got the distance but miss left, you’ll have a horrible second from the dunes.

The genius of this hole is the super-small, super-narrow green. It’s going to be difficult to hit this green if you’ve gone for it and missed more than a few yards wide because Google Earth shows that it’s about 40 feet wide at its widest. But it is angled toward the middle of the fairway, so an accurate lay up means that you’ll play into the 90 foot deep length. Contrary to my conservative golfing nature, I went for the green and ended up in one of the front bunkers, which is not bad if you can do it.

In short, this is a very short par 4 over some interesting terrain that places a premium on accuracy. I think this hole could be interesting for anyone and I’d imagine that they’d try to work it into a composite routing for a tournament. It’s probably my favorite hole on the property.

Playing parallel to the par 5s thirteen and sixteen on the big course, number twenty-three is…another par 5. But this one doesn’t have a mess of fairway bunkers and it does have something that you don’t see on the big course: a tree in the fairway. The hole is about 500 yards and the tree is 150 from the green, so it could definitely come into play for a big hitter who drives it up the left side. But other than this, a bunker 120 yards short and a slightly obscured second shot, there isn’t much to this hole.

My caddie thought that twenty-four is the most beautiful hole on the property and I can see why. This is the most links-like part of the property and this hole crosses it without any fuss; there’s just one fairway bunker on the right and it’s easy to avoid. A run-up onto the green will be easier from the right side.

The twenty-fifth is another par 5 and a bit of an odd one, but in a good way. The fairway gets quite narrow between bumpy rough on the left and junk on the right. And the approach is also pretty challenging, with three bunkers crossing the fairway in the lay up zone and a pond on the left. Maybe long hitters would be able to carry all the bumpy ground, reach the open flat off the tee, and carry the trouble to go for the open and receptive green in two. But for the rest of us, this hole poses a lot of interesting challenges and it’s probably the most interesting par 5 in the 27 holes.

Twenty-six is a stern 190 yard par 3 to a narrow green with bunkers right and left. It’s a good use of flat ground and would also be a nice inclusion in a composite course to give it a fourth par 3. But I’m not sure that there’d be a way to fit it in the routing.

The final hole, a par 5, is probably the most out-of place on the property, running between pine trees left and right. But I thought it was pretty good; while it looks open on the right side, the fairway isn’t as wide as it seems and the rough is pretty deep. If you’re too far left however, your approach to the green will be blocked by a very nice Monterrey Cypress tree, which is very much at home in this cool, damp, windy place.

Hole-for-hole, there’s not much separating 19-27 from the Championship Course. It’s a bit shorter, but I’m sure they could find some room for back tees if they had reason to, like they have on the big course. There are also fewer fairway bunkers, so it’s not quite as challenging off the tee. And the routing is a bit disjunct, with at least a 200 yard walk from the short par 4 fourth to the fifth and another 150 yard walk from the seventh to the eighth.

But save for the first and last holes, the terrain is probably more interesting on average and it has a bit more variety in the holes. That it isn’t a constant stream of mid-to-long par 4s like the big course also helps create variety. So again, if you’re in the area and can drop the big money for the big course, you should spend the extra (I think it was 350 vs. 300 euros) to play the third nine.

The first stop on my big golf trip of 2023—an 11 day, 14 course tour of Ireland from Dublin, through Northern Ireland, to Donegal—was The Island, about a 30 minute drive northeast of Dublin but only about 15 minutes from my hotel near the Dublin airport. For any golf tour starting in Dublin and working northwest toward the more famous Royal County Down and Royal Portrush, it along with Portmarnock (and perhaps Royal Dublin, which I didn’t see) are the first two noteworthy courses you’ll encounter and, depending on your budget, should play. I’ve heard several times that The Island was one of the most under-appreciated courses across Ireland and Northern Ireland and was even told by one of my German playing partners that it was recently ranked ‘the best’ course in Ireland (not sure by whom). In any case, certainly worth checking out.

And it is. And I probably wouldn’t argue with its inclusion on a top-10 list of courses in Ireland and Northern Ireland. But at best, it should probably be near the bottom of that list. It was certainly among the top 5 courses that I played on my trip (along with Royal County Down, Royal Portrush, St. Patrick’s, and Portmarnock), but most likely at the bottom of that list. And I’m sure I’d have it behind some of the courses in the west that I didn’t play, like Ballybunion and Lahinch.

Ok. So I think the course is very good and maybe great, but not in the highest company. Why? It’s obviously a spectacular site, with the holes winding through huge sand dunes. The routing through these dunes is good and most of the holes are very good from tee to green. But several of the holes are fairly narrow and the grass on the dunes is quite thick. So given the ever-present wind, it’s very difficult unless you’re a top notch ball striker.

And the real issue for me comes at the greens, which are also very difficult. Many are narrow and have steep run-offs at the edges. And it’s this layering of difficult that I find a bit too much; it’s already very difficult from tee to green but then the greens are some of the hardest to hit that I’ve seen, especially given the wind. It’s the same criticism that I have of Greywalls in Michigan—the landscape was always going to give you a very difficult course from tee to green and I think it would have been sensible to make it a bit easier around the greens to bring some balance to the challenge.

But like Greywalls, this is still an excellent course. I like almost all of the individual elements of the course. It’s an interesting driving course and not too severe. The fairway bunkers are not excessive and well-placed where they do occur. And taken independently of the rest of the course, the green complexes are very good. The ample run-offs at their edges are interesting in their own right and there’s a lot of good interior contour. Moreover, there are several very good to excellent holes, including much of the opening and closing stretches. All of that adds up to a very good course and, given that a lot of raters like a difficult course, one that I’m a bit surprised isn’t usually considered in the highest echelons of Irish courses. But maybe most of the raters see things the way I do—this is a case where I’m afraid that the whole is somewhat less than the sum of its parts.


The ~440 yard first (the card is in meters so I’ll give a rough translation) gives a very representative introduction to the course: pretty and interesting, but very tough. There’s ample room off the tee…but only for about the first 250 yards, where the dunes come in on both sides. Unless you’re very confident in your driving, it’d be best to lay back here. But that’ll also leave a very long iron to a green with a narrow opening between some pretty nasty dunes. Definitely one of the least-friendly opening holes that I’ve played.

The second is a par 4 of about 400 yards with a semi-blind drive. It’s a bit hard to tell from the tee but a miss left is much better than one right because there isn’t much rough between this and the third fairway further left. And unlike the first hole, there isn’t too much trouble, so you should feel free to swing away.

And hopefully you did and hit a long drive because the green is even less friendly than the first, perched up and narrow, with steep run-offs on all sides. I get that it’s an easier driving hole and that it makes sense to have a tougher green complex, but unless you’re very precise with your irons, this one is very difficult to hit and hold. Not really the type of green you should build on a links course, where the ground is usually firm and the wind is usually blowing.

Three is a short par 5 over modest terrain, so the architect added a driving challenge in the form of staggered fairway bunkers, the first ~240 out on the right and the second ~280 out on the left. The approach into the green is very interesting, especially if you go for the green in two. The fairway slopes left-to-right and the green is narrow and built up on a ridge on its right side, making for a very awkward third if you miss right. I would say that the design of this green would be almost perfect…except that the dunes encroach too far into the fairway on the left side of the lay-up zone and I’m not sure it’s possible to run one in without your ball kicking well right of the green.

The rest of the front nine has apparently been reworked extensively over the past several years and the short par 3 fourth is a new hole. And it’s a very good one, with excellent shaping on and around the green that does a very good job of blending into its surroundings. But again, you need to be very precise with your tee shot to hit the green in any kind of wind or if the conditions are firm…and you’re pretty much guaranteed to have at least one of those.

I think the fifth played about 380 from our green tees (probably ~6700 yards) just ahead of the first image and from there it just didn’t look wide enough to hit driver (you’d have to from the 470 yard tips). The fairway narrows in the last 175 yards and you run out of room on the left. It’s a good time to try out your stinger 3-wood or long iron because the fairway also slopes forward and you can get quite a bit of roll out.

The green is intimidating even with a short iron, especially this nasty pin on the left. If they ever allow the Republic to host the Open Championship, I’d nominate the Island to host it, even over its more famous neighbor Portmarnock.

We get our first real quirk with the blind drive on the similar length par 4 sixth. While the drive is intimidating, there’s plenty of room past about 220—although that was a problem for us because it was into the wind. But once you clear the crest, the rest of the hole is delightful, with lots of little bumps in the fairway and a green that, for once, is receptive to a good approach. Because it was into the wind for us, it was yet another tough hole. But this wind aside, the hole is a nice foil to the much more challenging opening holes.

Seven, a par 4 of only about 340 yards, is another tough driving hole if you have any kind of ambition, with staggered bunkers at 220 on the right and 240 on the left. The hole turns left around the second bunker and the best placement is close to, but definitely right of it. If you’re short and left of the bunker, you might have a blind second. The green is narrow, angled toward the left side of the fairway, has nasty dunes on the right, and a steep drop-off on the left. So again, very tough but interesting because anything up the right side of the hole leaves you a very shallow angle into the green.

One of the unfortunate—and surprising—things about this first round is that we followed three fourballs of ladies who were playing a club match…and were some of the slowest golfers I’ve ever seen. My experience playing in the UK is that everyone plays quite fast and is very conscientious about holding up those behind them. Not the case with these ladies—it took us over two hours to play the first seven holes.

But after playing the seventh, I had an idea that I was quite proud of. Because the seventh finishes near the clubhouse and the ninth hole returns, we could skip in front of the ladies who were on the eighth and ninth, go straight to the tenth, then come back and play eight and nine at the end. Good move—even though they started before 4 and had over 5 hours of sunlight, the last of the matches couldn’t finish. Starting at 4:20, we managed to finish just before 9.

So I’ll skip ahead in my pictures to the end of our round for the eighth and ninth holes, both ~410 yard par 4s. These are the two newest holes, replacing an (apparently) awkward short par 4 and a par 3. And they both had a bit of a new feel, with flatter fairways. I liked the green site on the eighth, perched above an interesting collection of mounds on the left. But the ninth felt a bit like one of those 90s US suburban public courses, with a flat fairway running between lines of mounds up both sides (obviously these look better).

For the most part, the back nine is on flatter land than the front and the holes are more subdued. The drive on the par 5 tenth is an excellent start and this was probably my favorite driving hole on the course, doglegging right around out-of-bounds with a cluster of bunkers up the left, right where you’d want to bailout. The rest of the shots are a bit tamer although you can see that you really want to make sure that you get your approach all the way to the green.

Eleven is another par 4 of around 420 yards and crosses the tamest ground so far. You can cut the corner up the right (as I accidentally did), but then you’ll have a sketchy lie with an awkward angle into the green. This is another green with some nasty run-offs at the sides but I thought it worked quite well because it’s open in the front and your pitch won’t be too hard if you miss short.

The drive on the 440 yard twelfth is awkward because the hole doglegs left but the fairway slopes right and you lose visibility after about 240 yards. But if you do hit it straight (or even better, with a draw) your ball will bound forward and you can have a shorter iron into this green that sits nicely in the dunes.

Next we come to one of The Island’s most famous holes: a 200+ yard par 3 that’s sort of a version of the famous Calamity at Royal Portrush, with a severe drop off short and right. This would be a hard hole in any conditions but it didn’t help that we had to play it in a rainstorm that lasted almost exactly the amount of time it took us to play this hole.

Without a doubt, the ~350 yard fourteenth is The Island’s strangest hole, with about a 60 foot wide fairway hemmed in by dunes on the left and a marsh on the right. It’s kind of a silly hole but at least it’s all right there in front of you and it’s clear what you have to do—just hit whatever you can hit straight.

The par 5 fifteenth is a lovely hole and maybe the first on the course where you can stand on the tee and breathe a little bit. The left side is well bunkered but there’s plenty of room right and it’d take a drive of well over 300 yards to reach the dune that cuts into the fairway. The approach narrows as you approach the green but there’s little trouble if you lay back to around 100 yards. It’d be nice if there were a few more holes with some width like this to complement so many narrow ones throughout.

Back to the difficulty with the mid-iron par 3 sixteenth. The green is perched on a hill with a false front, front flanking bunkers, and dips and long rough around the edges. Also, you don’t want to be above the hole because the green pitches pretty good from back-to-front.

Although I was a bit exhausted by the long day and tough weather at this point, that wasn’t enough to distract me from seeing that the par 4 seventeenth was probably the best hole on the course. Again, it’s a very tough driving hole, with a massive dune about 230 out on the left and bunkers about 260 on the right. Hidden from view short of the dune is a massive hollow so woe unto anyone who goes left.

But I thought that the green complex—especially given the difficulty of the drive—was the best on the course. It’s innocuous-looking from the fairway but when you approach it, you can see that it’s got all kinds of interesting interior and surrounding contours and that you can use the general slope to feed one in the open side on the left. I suppose that the rough and tumble nature of the property didn’t lend itself to simpler green sites such as this. But I see no reason why greens like the second of fifth couldn’t have been built at-grade as here. More greens like this would have brought some much needed balance to this course.

The long par 4 eighteenth is an appropriate finishing hole, both for this course and in general. Again, it’s a tough drive, although there’s a bit more room here than some of the other holes that cut through the dunes. The approach to the green is a bit simpler than others, without all the excessive contours at the edges.

One of the things I’ve noticed in the past few years is that sometimes, there’s puzzlingly little relationship between course/slope ratings and the actual difficulty of courses. My home course, the University of Maryland, has a slope rating in the 120s and a course rating about one stroke over par—even from the 7,000 yard tips. Yet it’s one of the toughest driving courses that I play because of fairway bunkers, slopes, and the encroachment of trees and the greens are heavily defended by bunkers. I suppose there aren’t a lot of water hazards or OB, but these are hardly the only things that make a course difficult. As a 3ish handicap, I struggle to shoot below the high 70s, which I routinely do on courses with higher course and slope ratings.

This same puzzle arises when you compare The Island to Portmarnock, which I played the next day. Portmarnock was probably a bit shorter from the tees that I played, yet has a course rating about one stroke higher (both par 72) and a slope rating about 10 points higher than the tees I played on The Island. I simply don’t understand how anyone could find Portmarnock, which is relatively flat and doesn’t have much deep rough harder than The Island, which is anything but flat and obviously does have deep rough. I suppose there are a few more fairway bunkers at Portmarnock, but not nearly enough to make it as hard a driving course as this, where you’re guaranteed to be hacking out of the dunes a few times…if you’re lucky enough to find your ball.

I suspect it comes down to the relative prestige of the courses. Portmarnock is probably the Republic’s premier club and has hosted many tournaments, so the raters, working from criteria that are probably quite open to interpretation, give it high marks for difficulty. Still, I don’t know what they’re not seeing on The Island. Perhaps the raters don’t play the courses when they’re rating them? Perhaps they all drive it rifle straight? Because I don’t understand how any normal golfer couldn’t find this to be one of the harder courses they’ve ever played. Maybe that’s reason in itself to hope that The Island continues to build on the reputation that it’s developing—then the raters might start to give it the credit for difficulty that it deserves and the members won’t look like a bunch of sandbaggers when they play away club competitions. I would not want to play a handicap match against anyone who plays their golf here.

​The fourth course at Bandon is Old MacDonald, a collaborative effort between Tom Doak, George Bahto…and Charles Blair MacDonald. Replica holes like the Redan and the Road Hole have come back in fashion in the past few decades and these, of course, were MacDonald’s calling card. His courses were comprised largely of his takes on famous holes from the UK, often with interesting adaptations to fit their sites. Doak, Bahto, and company decided to do a similar thing here with the set of holes that MacDonald often used (plus some additional UK holes that he didn’t), although with perhaps even less concern about replicating the details of original holes. Several of these holes would be better described as ‘inspired by’ the originals rather than replicas of them.
 
I’m not going to spend too much of this review analyzing these holes for how well they capture the originals. I haven’t played most of the originals. And honestly, I couldn’t tell you which hole most of the holes here are replicating (or ‘inspired by’). I’m going to focus on what I see as their merits as golf holes, all that aside.
 
And there are two things that stand out to me about this course. One, the land itself, which reminds me more of British links land than any of the other courses at Bandon in that much of the property is fairly flat but bumpy. Two, the greens, which are huge and heavily contoured. It’s interesting that Doak’s two courses at Bandon are this and Pacific Dunes…because they’re probably the two least-similar courses here. The primary challenge at Pacific Dunes is the narrow greens, which heavily favor certain angles of approach. The green contours are minimal. The opposite is the case here; the green contours are the principle challenge here. The angle of approach is less important, although where you miss relative to the pin is.
 
While I think Old Macdonald’s style stands in starkest contrast with Pacific Dunes, its reputation at Bandon seems to contrast most with Bandon Trails. What I mean by that is that while everyone likes Bandon Trails and consistently rates it as one of the top 2 courses at Bandon, Old MacDonald seems to be very polarizing. Some like it a lot, others (including several of the guys I went with) think it’s the weakest course at Bandon. This doesn’t surprise me because severe greens are always polarizing. I’d probably have it in the bottom half of the Bandon courses (but not last) but there’s a critical caveat: this is probably the most complicated of the Bandon courses and I only played it once. It’s a course that you need to play a few times because there’s a lot going on and you can probably make much more sense of it on repeat plays.
 
 
The first drive is inviting enough…especially when it’s too cold to hit it the roughly 250 yards to reach the right bunker. The most notable thing about this hole, as with pretty much every hole here, is the green, which is the Double Plateau green. The front-right of the green is large and modestly contoured, but there are plateaus on the left and at the back-right. The back-right plateau is very small and apparently they never put the pin there because it runs off on all sides and kills the pace of play. Maybe it wasn’t a great idea to make this the first green.

​I think the par 3 second is Old MacDonald’s take on the Eden hole at St. Andrew’s, with the deep fronting Strath bunker. The green is much deeper than appears from the tee and you don’t want to mess with right pins. You also really don’t want to go long.

​The drive on the short par 4 third is one of the resort’s most famous, blind over a steep ridge with the famous ‘Ghost Tree.’ From the tips, the tree is probably just left of the line to the green and this is probably the ideal line. The fairway slopes heavily to the right but if you hug the left side closely enough with your drive, you can probably get it to bound forward toward the green. 

I hit what I thought was the crappiest slice ever…and still ended up it the fairway with a decent look at the green. There’s probably something to be gained with a good drive here but not much to be lost, unless you hook it into the dunes on the left or hit a bomb way out to the right.

There’s a lot to be lost if you don’t hit a good drive on the almost impossibly-long par 4 fifth (I moved up a set of tees and it’s still 470). There’s a ridge running diagonally from short-left to long-right up the fairway and takes probably 260 to carry it up the right, even from the 470 tees. For most of us, it’s best to aim left and mentally adjust to this playing as a par 5 because the green is fronted by a dip that will carry your ball off to the right and is very hard to hit from long range.

The short par 3 fifth, aptly named ‘short,’ can be either very easy or very hard, depending on what you do from the tee. It’s obvious from the tee what the main issue here is: the green is huge and crazy. But one thing that I really liked about this hole is that it’s easy to tell from the tee where you can and can’t miss it, regardless of where the pin is. For this pin, you obviously don’t want to miss up the slope to the right (which of course I then did). Short is probably fine but a bit long is very good because the slope should bring your ball back toward the hole. It’d be similar if the pin were in the bowl up the hill to the right.

Some people find this green too severe but it doesn’t bother me because it’s transparent and with a little bit of attention and some thinking, you can develop a sensible approach to it. (whether you deliver on that is another matter). But this hole wouldn’t work as well if parts of the green were obscured.

​Naturally following the hole called ‘short’ we should have one called ‘long.’ There are some bunkers up the left side of the fairway but no reason as far as I can tell to challenge them. The bigger issue is a massive bunker fronted by wooden bulkheads that largely cuts off the direct path to the green and which requires you to get within about 100 yards of the green to carry. 

​I believe that the short par 4 seventh is an original. It’s probably the most distinctive hole here. While you can shorten the hole by aiming at the green, the gorse is pretty tight on the left side and you certainly want no part of that. This hole is all about the uphill second shot. Simply put, you must get it up onto the level of the green or you’re screwed.

Eight is Old MacDonald’s take on the Biarritz and it’s a pretty loose interpretation. One of the distinctive things about this Biarritz is that the green slopes front-to-back. This probably makes front pins interesting, but also difficult if the hole is playing downwind.

I’m not really sure what the 415 yard ninth hole is supposed to be but I thought it was a good hole. It’s one of the tougher driving holes, with bunkers up the right and a few more encroaching further out on the left. It’s probably a bit better to be up the left side here to avoid having to come in over the front-right green side bunker. 

​I’m also not sure what the long par 4 tenth is, but I also liked it. The issue is obviously all the bunkers crossing the fairway. You’ll need about 240 from the 440 yard green tees to carry it. Into the wind, it’s probably best to just treat this like a par 5, just like the fourth hole (Or you can cheat and move up to the 380 yard gold tees, like I did).

​The green is also incredibly tough to hit from any kind of distance. To be honest, this green probably works best for a mid to short-iron. I may not have liked this hole as much if I had played it from the tips or the green tees.

​I knew what the eleventh hole was just standing on the tee—it’s the Road Hole. Now obviously this take is quite different from the original because you aren’t driving blind over a wall and a building. But you still don’t want to miss right, which is all bunkers and gorse.
 
Going by the analytics and not taking on the hazards up the right, I played to the left side of the fairway. Clearly it isn’t a good idea to go at the pin here and there appears to be more safe room right then left, so I tried to play to the front-right of the green. Well, I ended up pulling it and going at the far-left corner of the green…which wasn’t too bad a spot. I know that players will intentionally play toward the eighteenth tee when the pin is back-left and I can understand why.
 
I suspect that the best way to play the Road Hole is to completely reject its concept; aim left off the tee then aim long-left on the approach.

​The twelfth hole is supposed to be the Redan and while there doesn’t seem to be full agreement on whether it actually is a Redan, there seems to be close to universal agreement that it isn’t a good hole. The problem is that unless the pin is in the back-left, the green is perched too high above its surroundings and isn’t deep enough for anyone to be able to reasonably hit it. And if you don’t hit it, you can go back-and-forth. Unfortunately, it’s another of the many modern greens that completely overdo the Pinehurst runoff concept. 

Apparently the short par 4 thirteenth is the Leven hole, which I know nothing about. But whether this hole is a close replica or not, it’s a solid hole in its own right. The major feature is the green, which has a huge bowl at its front-right. It’s probably best to play up the left side off the tee so that you’re playing into the opening of the green rather than over the bunkers. But the most important thing is not to miss long-left if the pin is on the right side. It’s probably almost impossible to two putt from there. 

​Fourteen is another short par 4 that I don’t recognize. Like thirteen, it’s an easy driving hole. I don’t think there’s much advantage to being up the left, so it’s best to aim up the right, away from the trouble. The main thing here is that like seven, you must be sure to carry your second up onto the green. 

The par 5 fifteenth is called Westward Ho! and while I have played that course, this hole didn’t remind me of anything there (in part because there’s more than two feet of elevation change). It’s a lovely par 5 in its own right; there’s a lot of room off the tee and you should try to rip it as far as you can. The green is tiered and steeply pitched from back-to-front, so it’s important not to be too far past the hole.

​Sixteen is an Alps/Punchbowl hole and it’s a very good one. If you can, it’s best to be long and up the right side because you might be able to get a view of the green. If you’re up the left side, it’s completely blind (we could have used an aiming post). It’s best to hedge short and left on the approach because the green slopes from back-right to front-left.

​The par 5 seventeenth is a bit of a mess, but not a bad hole. It’s a split fairway, where you can make the longer carry up the right for the more direct line at the green or play out safely to the left. Going up the right would also bring trouble in the form of gorse right of that into play. For most of us, it’s probably best to just go up the left side.

​As we can tell from my second picture below, if you don’t know the hole, it’s possible to play to the wrong green—the green on the right, which I’ve centered in my photo, is actually the second green. The seventeenth green is up the fairway past a bunch of bunkers on the left. I think again here it’s best to just stay far to the left, even though your third will probably be blind. There’s just too much trouble up the right side for any benefit you might get from hitting over there.

​No one seems to think too much of the long par 4 eighteenth hole, with its very fake-looking punchbowl green. But it’s a challenging driving hole and I like the fact that you can run the ball onto the green using the mounds up the left side.

​Overall, I really liked Old MacDonald. It’s different from the three previous Bandon courses and a nice change of pace. It’s much more of a test of the putter than those, more in line with several of Doak’s other courses, which are known for their severe greens. I know that a lot of people don’t like this about Doak’s courses, but I think that the severe greens work well here—they’re large enough and there’s enough room to play coming into them.
 
But one feeling that I had just a few holes in that has remained with me since is that I think they should have built a different type of course here. I mentioned at the outset that this land reminds me much more of classic links land than the other Bandon courses. Most of the property is flat but bumpy. And I think that given this, I would have preferred a course in the mould of the great Open Championship courses, with sod wall bunkers and more modest greens. None of the other courses at Bandon are anything like that and as far as I’m aware, there isn’t really anything in the US like that. It would have been a different way to bring variety to the resort and I think most people would have liked it more.
 
Still, Old MacDonald is the course at Bandon that I’m most interested in playing again on a return trip. I got to play Bandon Dunes and Trails twice each and while I only played Pacific Dunes once, I feel that it was much easier to grasp what’s going on there than it is here. I feel that there’s a lot that I could still learn about this course. I’m looking forward to having the opportunity to come back and find out.