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.

​The third course at Bandon Dunes is Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw’s Bandon Trails. Having arguably two of the three best courses of the modern ‘renaissance’ era (Sand Hills and Friar’s Head), they were an obvious choice for course #3. But apparently is was Mike Keiser more than they who had reservations about offering the third course to them because unlike the Bandon Dunes and Pacific Dunes, the third course would be confined to the forest around the south entrance drive and would only have room for a few holes in the dunes.
 
Apparently this didn’t deter Coore and Crenshaw and when you get into the forested part after playing the first two holes in the dunes, it’s easy to see why: the forest is absolutely gorgeous and the land is incredibly interesting. I find it hard to understand why Mike Keiser would have thought that a course on this land would be anything less than a slam dunk. Perhaps he was concerned that the big hill that separates holes 1-6 and 14-18 from holes 7-13 would make it difficult to create a cohesive routing and/or build a course without a few awkward holes. But these challenges notwithstanding, the property is excellent—hillier than than its coastal siblings, but not just on the side of a hill. There are plenty of interesting larger and smaller scale contours. And while often a drawback on other courses, the trees are among the most beautiful that I’ve seen on any course and never get in the way without reason.
 
Indeed the main controversy about Bandon Trails has become whether it’s actually the best course at the resort. It seems like the architecture purists and low handicappers like it, the purists probably because the land and the architecture are interesting with the latter never trying to outdo the former, and the low handicappers because it’s challenging, but gives you some room to miss around the greens (unlike Pacific Dunes), which themselves aren’t too wild (unlike Old MacDonald).
 
Since I fall in both categories and love a hike through big, beautiful trees, it was probably obvious that I would love this course. But there are a few points that I’d like to highlight at the outset, which I hope to clarify as I discuss the holes. For my liking, this might be the most beautiful course I’ve ever played. The variety of landscapes is outstanding but for me, the character of the forest is truly special. I’ve hiked in a lot of forests in a lot of different places, and this forest is both one of the most beautiful as a backdrop and has the among the best texture, with plants of many different shapes and colors when you look at them up close.
 
And I’m not sure that I seen golf architecture that blends so well with its surroundings. Even in the forested holes, the bunkers seem to disappear into their surroundings and the greens look like they’re sitting on unshaped land. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a course that gets the small details of the shaping so right. Aesthetically, this course is a 10 for me. And as we’ll see, it’s not all just beauty—playing these holes well takes a good deal of thought.
 
 
The first hole here is a bit like the first hole at Sand Valley—a short par 4 where you shouldn’t cause yourself too much trouble if you’re just conservative off the tee. It’s a nice, ample fairway if this happens to be your first shot at the resort (like it was for us). But this green is also much wider than the first at Sand Valley and as long as you hedge toward the front of the green, you shouldn’t have too much trouble here.

​The par 3 second makes up for the lack of trouble at the first and then some if you play the 230 yard back tees. One, it’s incredibly intimidating from the tee. Two, if you’re even with the green and miss wide, you might just want to walk to the next tee. But that’s also the beauty of the hole—if you just hedge short, it’s very playable. You can’t see all of the open space in front of the green, but there’s plenty there. So the smart play from the back tees is to pick a club that gets you near the front of the green, but not past that.
 
Although I made an absolute mess of this hole, it was one of my favorite par 3s at the resort. It’s still a good challenge if you move up a set of tees to 170 yards because you still face the issue of the green getting narrower the deeper you hit into it.

We head into the forest with the par 5 third and it’s pretty clear immediately that the course won’t lose any interest. This image from the tee is absolutely gorgeous and that has nothing to do with my photography skills—the coast lodgepole pines with moss hanging off the branches and the various sized shrubs that dot the landscape…mmm. Actually this course reminded me a lot of pictures I’ve seen of Japan, with its coniferous trees of various heights and shapes. And you can’t give a landscape job a much higher complement than to say it looks Japanese.
 
Anyway, so how about the hole itself? It’s a good one. Bunkers start on the left at about 220 yards and there’s a centerline bunker about 290 from the tips. The left side is a shortcut and might bring the green within reach in two. But there’s much more room to the right (more than appears) and if you have the length to reach this green up the left, you probably have the length to reach it from the right. If you can’t, lay up short of centerline bunkers that start at 90 yards.

​I think that the 400 yard par 4 fourth is one of the best holes that I’ve seen of this length anywhere. You get a clue from the tee what makes it so good; there’s a ridge in the fairway that runs from short-left to long-right, in the direction of the green. This ridge bisects the fairway and if you can carry over it, you’ll have a clear view of the green.
 
But here’s the catch: it’s a much longer carry over the ridge up the right side (probably 270 if you go over the right bunker) than over the small centerline bunker on the left (maybe 220). But if you hedge too far left, your ball can kick forward off the other side of the ridge into fairway bunkers. Even if it doesn’t, the further left you are, the more difficult the shot into the green, which is skinny but deep and angles toward the right side of the fairway. Plus, it slopes from left to right. So this hole really rewards someone who hits a long ball up the right side.
 
As someone who doesn’t, I think it’s still best to play up the right side and take the blind second. It’s easy to run into the bunkers on the left and the tilt of the green makes for a very tough shot, even if you’re in the fairway.

​The 130 yard par 3 fifth was a favorite in my group and that certainly doesn’t suggest any fault in our taste. Obviously, it’s another beautiful hole. But, as is reasonable for a hole of this length, there’s also a lot going on with the green. It’s sort-of a two-tiered biarritz, where the back tier is higher than the front tier. But unlike most biarritzes, there are also a lot of little slopes within each level and at the edges.

​The sixth is another ~400 yard par 4 and is a bit complicated. The fairway is clearly bifurcated into a high right and a low left side. The centerline bunker up the right is about a 250 carry and if you can go right of or carry this, you would think that this would leave you the best approach.
 
And it might most of the time (I didn’t try it), but there’s also a danger: too strong a drive on this line could kick forward into a bunker about 290 out. If playing this line, you probably have to land your ball near the bunker so that it takes the slope left into the center of the fairway. And if you carry the centerline bunker on its left side with some steam, you could run into a blind centerline bunker about 300 out.
 
Or you can just play up the wide left side of the fairway (much wider than it seems), which will leave a more awkward angle for the approach, but one that won’t be too long if you’ve hit a decent drive. I suspect this is the most sensible play for almost everyone.

​The long par 4 seventh is far less complicated. Hugging the big bunker on the right allows both you to avoid carrying the bunker short-left of the green and to play into the primary slope of the ground. Still, I don’t think it’s such an advantage to be here over the middle of the fairway so this is a drive where you can relax. But you’d better hit a solid approach into the green, which has a false front and is two-tiered.

​Along with the second, the 320 par 4 eighth was the primary source of my ‘strokes over par’ in my two round on Bandon Trails. It’s clearly narrower than what we’ve played so far. The smart thing to do here is hit it about 210 yards, which keeps you short of the right bunker. But it’s certainly tempting to go for it and if you’re confident in your driver, it’s probably not a bad play—just don’t pump it into the bushes in the right or snap hook it down the hill on the left.

​The long (~565 yard) par 5 ninth is very beautiful and very interesting, but in a subtle way. The drive is actually pretty simple; the bunker straight ahead is about 330 out, so you probably don’t have to worry about that. Other than needing to avoid a snap hook into the bunker/crap left, it’s one of the least-demanding drives on the course.

Different from just about every other par 5, the most interesting shot here is the layup. There’s a pretty long bunker that starts about 150 yards from the center of the green on the left. On the right, big trees encroach and the space between narrows until you’re about 110 yards from the center. So it makes sense to lay back just short of that, maybe to 125 yards.

​Ten is a par 4 of 420 yards where the strategy is pretty clear from the tee: hug the left fairway bunker and have a fairly open approach into the green, hit to the more ample right side of the fairway and have to come in over the vast right green side bunker. Very simple, very good.

​I absolutely love the long par 4 eleventh although into the wind each time I played it, it was very tough. There’s endless room left off the tee but it’s pretty important to be near the bunkers on the right because you’ll want to shorten the hole. If not into the wind, you might be able to carry them at about 260, but it’s probably always best to hedge a bit left here as you can run down a hill into junk on the right.

​The approach into the green is glorious—this is probably the best-looking pond hole that I’ve ever seen (certainly our many goose-shit-surrounded examples in southeastern Michigan don’t provide much competition). It’s also an interesting approach, straight-forward if you’ve driven it up the right side, but requiring negotiation of a bunker about 30 yards short of the front of the green on the left. You’ll want to hedge away from the pond for the obvious reason that it’s a pond, but also because there’s a subtle left-to-right tilt in the land that can feed your ball onto the green.

​I love a long par 3 that allows you to run the ball onto the green but the twelfth was a bit dull for my tastes. There’s a nice visual illusion with the left bunker—it’s still 60 yards from the front of the green at its closest. Much more relevant is the big mound at the right edge of the green which can cause much trouble for a shot flared right.

The thirteenth—another 400 yard par 4—is an outstanding driving hole. It seems like there’s a lot of room on the right but there isn’t; the trees start at about 240 from the tips and the right side of the fairway slopes toward them. I wouldn’t recommend hitting it over here but I would absolutely recommend ball-hunting here; searching for a playing partner’s ball for a few minutes, I found a half-dozen new Pro-V1s and Taylor Made TP5s.
 
It’s a bit tougher to get yourself to play up the left side because the trees encroach and the bunkers start at about 250. So unless you’re confident in your driving accuracy, it might be best to lay back a bit. The approach is a tough one to an elevated plateau green. Missing short or long is alright, but to either side is not.

​You get your one opportunity here to ride in a cart (actually the back of a trailer) for the 180 yard, 60 foot uphill journey to the fourteenth tee. Not wanting to wait for everyone to pile in, I just walked. Apparently they offer the choice now because someone had a heart attack walking up this hill. If that did it, he probably wasn’t long for this world anyway.
 
If you don’t have a heart attack walking to the fourteenth tee, you might have one trying to play the fourteenth hole, a short par 4 that has attained substantial notoriety. The fairway is wide but the green is very narrow, angled toward the left side of the fairway. What makes this hole so difficult is a drop-off left of the green, which could cause back-and-forth chipping, especially if the flag is in the front. Our flags were in the back both times and I didn’t find the chip from left of the green here too bad.
 
I can see how the hole could cause some frustration, but I didn’t find it to be too tough…even though we had to play it in wind and rain that had materialized out of nowhere.

​Fifteen is another 400ish yard par 4 that should be quite simple; just stay short of the bunker that starts on the right about 100 yards short of the green. And actually, hedging left where the fairway is more open is good because this opens up the angle of the green a bit.

​We start to get a bit more of the dunes-feel again on the par 5 sixteenth, which is probably the course’s easiest driving hole. The bunker on the left is probably 310 out so you can probably let it rip. And if you hit a big slice, the hill on the right side will bring it back toward the middle.

​The bunkers on the right start about 100 yards short of the green but if you think you can reach the green, slopes on the left side will help funnel your ball toward the green. Otherwise it’s a simple lay up and a fairly simple, if uphill and semi-blind, wedge shot. A bit short is ok; don’t miss this green left.

The par 3 seventeenth is Bandon Trails' PR material hole and it’s certainly well-chosen. It’s actually a pretty difficult par 3. It’s only about 170 from the tips but there’s a big ridge and false front at the front of the green and not too much space between the bunkers up on top. It’s one of the most demanding iron shots on the course.

Apparently eighteen is 420 from the tips but we probably played it from about 360. Wherever they put the tees, obviously you don’t want to miss right. There’s a hill in the fairway about 150 yards short of the center of the green and if you clear it, you’ll get a few more yards. A straight-forward, but solid finish.

Given my love of hiking and a good forest, I was predisposed to like Bandon Trails. But the architecture is every bit its match. It’s probably kind of hard for a lot of people to talk about the architecture because it all feels so effortless. Everything blends into the surroundings, the slopes on and around the greens are subtle. But it must have taken extraordinary talent and hard work to make everything seem so effortless. Obviously a golf course is not a natural thing; they had to cut down a lot of trees and rough up the ground to make the slopes on and around the tees and greens playable for golf and to plant grass. That it looks like they didn’t do anything is the ultimate testament to the quality of the work. This is an extraordinary work of landscape architecture.
 
And I’d say the same thing about the strategies of the holes. Nothing jumps out here; there are no super visually dramatic holes with extreme bunkers and slopes (even the fourteenth doesn’t look troubling). But if you look closely, a lot of thought went into each of these holes and a shot played to one part of the fairway will always set you up better than one played to another. I especially appreciate how the contour of the ground generates so much of the interest in many of these holes. The fourth has to be one of the world’s greatest uses of contour as a driving hazard/opportunity, outdoing every hole even at Colt’s St. George’s Hill, a course which is the pinnacle of using contour as a driving challenge.
 
Ultimately discussion of any course at Bandon becomes one of where it falls in the Bandon hierarchy. And for me—and it seems many others including most in my group of eight—Trails is in the top 2 (which is the other is more controversial). I’m not sure that I’d have it ahead of Pacific Dunes because that course has several extraordinary holes, is very cleverly routed on an awkward piece of land, and has outstanding balance in its design. But it’s quite a bit harder than Bandon Trails, especially if you’re not highly accurate with your irons. Irons are the strength of my game, so I liked the challenge and so far would give Pacific Dunes the nod.
 
But I also only played Pacific Dunes once and played well, so if given a few more opportunities, it might give me some of the same frustration that it gives others. It’s not as relaxed a course as this one. So I’ll give the nod to Pacific Dunes for now but note that I’ll have to save the final verdict for a future trip.

As I mentioned in my review of Bandon Dunes, discovering and buying Tom Doak’s yellow Confidential Guide to Golf Courses in 1999 was a transformative event for me. It gave me a new golf course architecture hobby, one that unlike some of my earlier childhood hobbies, remains strong to this day. Although Doak had laid out his principles of design in his earlier book (which I also read) Anatomy of a Golf Course, it was the Confidential Guide which stuck with me because one, it introduced me to so many courses that I hadn’t heard of and two, Doak appeared to be completely uninterested in pulling punches, calling everything as he saw it. Going well beyond golf course architecture, and for better or worse, Doak’s intellectual style has been a major influence on me.

More substantively, Doak preached the gospel of the now ubiquitous ‘minimalism,’ the idea that architects should move a minimal amount earth to construct their courses and that the features of courses should reflect features of the land. Now Doak has said over the years that he isn’t a minimalist strictly speaking and he’s willing to move a large amount of earth if the site has minimal features (like his Rawls Course at Texas Tech). I think it probably makes more sense to call him a ‘naturalist,’ meaning that if the land is interesting, he’s a minimalist and uses the features of the land but if it isn’t, he constructs features but shapes them so that they look natural, with soft slopes and limited shaping outside of the green complexes. This contrasts with the maximalist shaping of courses in the 80s/90s, when architects would build mounds alongside their holes and around their greens.

But by 1999, and certainly in part because of the divisiveness of his writing, Doak hadn’t built any courses that got much more than local attention. That changed when he was given the opportunity to build Pacific Dunes, the follow-up course to Bandon Dunes. This spectacular site gave him the opportunity to put his principles into practice; more natural features than you could know what to do with and all sand, meaning that whatever shaping he did do would drain readily. And of course there were a couple hundred yards of clifftop ocean frontage. Pacific Dunes was Doak’s big break.

And he made the most of it, beginning the development of his reputation as one of the go-to guys if you have a great piece of property. Ever since it opened, the course has been the most highly ranked of the resort’s courses and is a regular in the top 25 on lists of the top 100 golf courses in the world. Now a good part of that is due to its obvious natural advantages—anyone should be able to build some great holes along the ocean and in the mid-sized sand dunes that cover much of the property.

But a big part of what makes this course so good is its unconventional nature. The property isn’t that large, is somewhat awkwardly shaped, and the land is flatter on a pretty good chunk of it (the north side). Doak’s answer to these challenges was to eat up the flatter land with long holes and build several par 3s and shorter par 4s on the more interesting land. This resulted in an unusual mix of holes, with only one par 3 and one par 5 on the front nine but four par 3s and three par 5s on the back.

Two other strengths are the clarity of Doak’s vision and his restraint. Throughout his career, Doak has been criticized for overdoing his greens. But, probably trying not to compete with the site and knowing that it would be windy, Doak toned down his green contours here, building a set of greens which are smaller and narrower than some of his other courses (like Old MacDonald next door), where the emphasis is more on setting up angles and precise iron play. Perhaps more than any other course that I’ve played, it’s important so set up the correct angle into greens here as they heavily favor shots played from the correct places in the fairway over others. Given this focus, to heavily contour these greens would have been to overdo the golf course and make it too difficult. It has a reputation as the most difficult course at the resort—probably because most golfers aren’t too good with their irons—but it’s possible to think your way around this course and through conservative play into the green, leave yourself many realistic chances at par.


Pacific Dunes starts with a pair of short par 4s. The first is definitely not one of the more inviting first holes that I’ve played, but there’s more room to play than appears if you can get it past a row of trees on the left, about 175 yards from the 325 yard standard back tees. With bunkers 230 out on the right, there’s no reason to get aggressive here. Just try to hit something straight, about 200-220 yards.

​The interest picks up with the ~360 yard second. The strategy is clear from the tee; if you carry two bunkers up the left side 220 and 240 from the tee, you’ll have a clear angle straight down the green. If you play out to the right, you’ll have a blind approach. But if you think it’d be a challenge to carry the bunkers, don’t bother. The visibility from the right side of the fairway may not be great, but the green is also very receptive from this angle and if you have decent distance control with your short irons, it’s still a green light shot.

​The northern part of the property, next to Old MacDonald, is the flattest and Doak used it to build four of his longest holes. Three is a par 5 of just under 500 yards. There are two large bunkers in the center of the fairway so you need to pick a side—the more obvious (and wider) right side where you’ll have to keep your drive between the bunkers and gorse and the left side, where you’ll have to keep it between the bunkers and mounds covered with junk. If you think you’ll want to go for the green, the left side is probably better because you can run the ball up the front-left of the green.
 
If you lay up, it’s also best to keep it up the left side and hedge left of the pin on your third—you don’t want any part of the front-right bunkers.

​After a short downhill walk past the snack hut, we come to what’s obviously one of the course’s standout holes: the long, coastline par 4 fourth. If you’re familiar with the place, you’ve probably seen pictures of it in some of the promotional material.
 
While it makes the pictures for its beauty, this is one where the quality of the design matches the setting. The main challenge is fitting your drive between a cluster of bunkers 250 out on the left and the coastline. If you’re short of these, it’ll be tough to reach the green. There’s about a 50 yard gap between the coast and the bunkers and while that should be plenty of room, let’s just say that it’s a bit more intimidating when the hazard on the other side is a cliff and an ocean than when it’s some long grass or a pond. The green complex is also very well-conceived—large and deep, but angled gently from left-to-right to better contain an approach from the right side of the fairway than the left. There are some nasty bunkers short and left of the green, but these shouldn’t be an issue unless you take a swipe at the green from too far out.

To me, this hole exemplifies the strengths of Pacific Dunes that I mentioned at the outset. The setting is obviously spectacular and the design doesn’t try to compete with it. A few bunkers up the left side and a gentle tilt to the putting surface give the advantage to those who play bravely along the coast. This is certainly in the small handful of best holes at the resort.

​At this point, the course turns inland back inland and, we might think, will lose some steam. It doesn’t. While not everyone in my group liked the par 3 fifth, I thought it was excellent. It’s one of the more playable holes on the course as shots played a bit left of the green should funnel back onto it. The green is deep and angles from front-left to back-right, with a narrow section surrounded by trouble at the back. Needless to say, when the pin is here, you should aim for the middle of the green.

 ​One of the holes that I was concerned about before I played Pacific Dunes was the short par 4 sixth, which has a narrow green perched above a bomb crater of a bunker at its left and a deep hollow at its right. I was worried that this would be one of these overly severe green complexes that you see on a lot of newer courses, where a slight miss can result in an impossible shot where you go back-and-forth across the green and make an X.
 
But that shouldn’t be the case here. To start, the drive is easier than I expected, requiring a carry of only about 215 yards over the dune and bunker on the right (but it was downwind for us). And the fairway is wide-open here. If you make the carry, it’s a straight-forward pitch up the hill. The trick here is to hedge short because the front of the green is wider than the back and the slope off the right side of the green becomes progressively steeper the deeper into the green you go. Needless to say, if you couldn’t carry the fairway bunker or ended up in the left side of the fairway for any other reason, you should play very conservatively into this green.

On the other hand, the long par 4 seventh will almost always be very difficult. The one thing going in our favor here is that the drive is to one of the widest fairways on the course and you can swing away without too much worry.
 
And you need a long drive here because the approach is to one of the tightest, most well-defended greens on the course, with bunkers and other junk up the entire left side starting a few dozen yards short of the green and more bunkers and junk short-right. It’s an extremely demanding approach for a longer iron and for most, it probably makes sense to lay 40 or 50 yards back in the fairway. This green site pushes the limits of difficulty for a long par 4 but it’s also the only one like this on the course, which makes it reasonable.

Holes like the mid-length par 4 eighth are what make Pacific Dunes stand out. There’s nothing particularly interesting about either the scenery or the land. There are no dramatic design features. Yet it’s an incredibly interesting hole because of three simple things: the shape of the putting surface, its angle, and the bunker at its front-right.
 
Like seven, the fairway here is wide. But unlike seven, it’s very important that you’re on the correct side of it, which is the left side. You want to get your drive as close to the trees on the left as you can without going in them because the green is skinny, deep, and angles from front-left to back-right. While the green’s skinniness precludes calling any shot into it easy, an approach from near these trees gives you the entire length of the green to play down while one from the right side of the fairway gives you a nasty angle over a bunker into the shallowest aspect of an unreceptive green. Regardless of where you drive it, it’s best to hedge a bit long as the back of the green is wider and more receptive than the front.
 
This hole is minimalism at its finest—not just minimalism in terms of shaping, but minimalism in terms of getting a maximum amount of interest out of a minimum of design elements. It looks innocuous, but there’s as much interest here as any at the resort.

Much busier and not the better for it is the mid-length par 4 ninth. This hole has two greens, high to the right and low to the left. Unfortunately, I only played Pacific Dunes once and only got to see the lower green. There isn’t much to this version of the hole. It’s only about 215 to carry the bunker on the left but it’s also unnecessary. Just hit something out to the right of it and take a slightly longer (but still not too long) iron in.
 
I thought that this was the weakest hole on the course. Maybe it’s better to the upper green?

​Much better is the very photogenic long par 3 tenth. I thought that this was a very good take on a longer (~210 for us) par 3; there’s a good amount of open ground at the front of the green but it narrows as you get deeper into it. There’s all kinds of trouble right if you push it, which I’m sure is quite common here. Maybe not world class, but a very solid long par 3.

​I think most would agree however that the short par 3 eleventh is world class. This is obviously one of the world’s most beautiful holes. I think it’s the hole that shows up the most in the resort’s promotional material.
 
But apart from being obviously beautiful, it’s an interesting hole. Unless you build a big, crazy green, there’s only so much that you can do with a short par 3. A common (and tired) template is the small green completely surrounded by bunkers. While this hole has bunkers tight to the sides, there’s a good amount of room between the bunkers in front and the green. There’s quite a bit of width at the front of the green and you can get away with some inaccuracy here.
 
You can’t, however get away with inaccuracy if playing to the back and if flying it all the way there, you’ll need to be precise. But you can also play to the middle-right of the green and use the slope coming off the right bunker to feed the ball into the back of the green. I’d have to play the hole a few more times to get a sense of how well this works. I hit my shot a bit too far right and it kicked my ball all the way to the left side of the green. I think it should work pretty well if you hit the lower part of the slope.

​If there’s a real breather hole at Pacific Dunes, it’s the 530 yard par 5 twelfth. There’s some gorse about 225 out on the right, but you shouldn’t be that far right. The only real feature here is a bunker in the middle of the fairway about 140 yards from the green. This might be an issue when the hole is playing into the wind in the summer but it wasn’t one for us. Best to hedge a bit right if going for the green in two because the right side is wide open.

​The next famous hole at Pacific Dunes is, not surprisingly, the next one that runs along the coast, a long par 4. This one is much easier off the tee than four, with almost endless room out to the right until past 300 yards. But, following the main theme of the design, the green is skinny and deep, making the angle from the right side of the fairway difficult. Playing to the front of the green is no bargain either as it has one of the course’s highest false fronts.
 
This hole didn’t play too hard downwind (and for some reason, they had moved the tees up), but I imagine that it’d be plenty challenging enough into the wind in the summer. There’s a lot of flexibility in the hole. While the false front and narrowness of the green make it difficult to hit, there’s plenty of room short that you can use if you’re playing it on an into-the-wind day when you’re just hoping to finish it with the same ball.

​Doak turns the screws on us a bit with the short par 3 fourteenth. You absolutely must hit your iron straight here as there is all kinds of trouble to the sides. You certainly want to hit to the front of the green in any kind of challenging conditions and short of the green probably isn’t too bad either, although I didn’t get a good look at it (having hooked my iron into the shit on the left).

​Fifteen covers some of the flattest land on the property and like three and twelve, Doak elected to cover this space with a par 5. Like twelve and to a lesser extent three, it’s a bit of a weak hole. The main feature is the cluster of bunkers right of the fairway, although these start between 280 and 320 out, depending on where they put the back tees. Because the hole was into the wind, they moved the tees way up (our caddie had never seen the back tees so far up), putting these bunkers within range at only about 230.
 
I suspect that this hole was designed to play to play into the wind because there’s plenty of room off the tee and plenty on the approach. You just have to stay left of a bunker in the center of the fairway about 80 yards short of the center of the green. But you should do this anyway because the green angles from front-left to back-right and has a pretty good slope on its right side. I think they made the hole a bit too easy in moving the tees up because it was easy to carry the centerline bunker and get near the green off a decent drive.

One problem with only playing a course once is that if you play a hole poorly, it might be difficult to say much about it. That’s the case with me and the short par 4 sixteenth. I hit my weakest drive of the day under a pine tree on the right side and cursed my way down the rest of the hole.
 
Because the hole is only about 335 from the tips, I should have gone with my instinct and laid back. Looking at my pictures and the aerial, I think that the play here is to place your tee shot in the far left of the fairway, which gives you a look straight down another skinny but deep green. In addition to the shallow angle, playing down the right side means that you’ll have to come over a steep ridge. But there’s also some slope left of the green that should help contain something a bit long from the right side. I’d have to play this hole a few more times to get a good sense of how well these different shots into the green work

Much simpler, but none the worse for it is the long par 3 seventeenth. This is the course’s take on the Redan and there’s plenty of room short and right of the green to run your ball on. But you don’t want to be too short and right; there’s a nasty cluster of bunkers under some pine trees about 50 feet short and right of the green. But unless you hit it in there, the hole shouldn’t be too difficult.

One hole that I think is almost always difficult is the long par 5 eighteenth. They gave us another break with the tees, putting us on the lower right tees that shortened the hole from about 580 to 540 and allowed us to play straight into the fairway rather than into it at an angle. But this also brought the bunkers that cut into the fairway on the left at about 240 into play.
 
The thing to note about this hole is that there isn’t much trouble for the last 150 yards. But there’s all kinds of trouble up to this point and I’d imagine that there are a few golfers who don’t make it to the 150 yard marker. Laying back off the tee would be prudent because anything right is in the bushes, but then it might be difficult to carry your approach into safety on the second. Sometimes a hole is just hard and you need to execute the shots.

​Some people, especially the big data types, question the importance of angles in golf. When you compare scoring into pins placed close to one side of the green, where ostensibly you’d want to be on the opposite side of the fairway to have the more open angle, they find that scoring is actually lower for those who’ve driven it up the same side of the fairway as the pin. Now this isn’t as important a factor for scoring as being in the fairway vs. the rough or certainly avoiding a hazard vs. not, but big data proponents conclude from this that chasing angles is overrated and that we should stick to simpler strategies like staying away from hazards and playing to the fat part of greens.
 
But one of the problems with the big data approach to golf is that it lumps very different types of scenarios together. Not all angles are created equal. If the green is fairly broad and the pin is tucked to one side, the slightly shorter shot from playing up the same side of the fairway as the pin gives a scoring advantage because there’s enough room that the angle doesn’t really make a difference. There’s a big difference between angles on a course with a lot of greens like that and one like Pacific Dunes where the greens are typically deep and narrow, giving you a clear view from one part of the fairway but not from others. I suspect that if we had big data from a sample of courses with greens designed for angles like those here, we’d start to find that angles are pretty important.
 
That’s the thing that stands out to me about Pacific Dunes: it takes a simple—but powerful and interesting—approach to creating strategy in golf holes and applies it to a great piece of property. Because this approach means a lot of narrow greens with challenging hazards at their sides, which will be difficult in the ever-present wind, the other elements that can make a course very difficult, like fairway bunkering and green contours are toned down. More than any of the other ‘new classics’ that I’ve played, Pacific Dunes excels in simplicity: it has a clear, smart design plan, sticks to it, and avoids the excesses of overdone greens and eye candy bunkers. The site was always going to result in a beautiful golf course and, with the weather, a difficult one. No need to compete with or try to enhance that.
 
At the same time, this somewhat formulaic approach might keep Pacific Dunes slightly behind some of its other peer courses that I’ve played—namely Sunningdale Old and Royal St. George’s—in my estimation. Those courses (especially the former) have a few completely original holes that don’t seem to follow any design template. Holes like 11 at Sunningdale Old or 4 at Royal St. George’s are very unusual, but help bring a variety-in-oddness to those courses that I really like and that Pacific Dunes doesn’t try to match. For going through a bunch of large sand dunes, Pacific Dunes is surprisingly not-quirky.
 
I might have worked myself into a bit of a contradiction here, praising the course at the outset for its unconventional mix of holes but then criticizing it (relative to some lofty peers) for lacking variety and quirk. But given the sand dunes and the narrowness of the property, there was probably a real danger of having several bad holes and this unconventional mix of holes probably allowed Doak to avoid this. There’s a fine line between quirkiness and badness and if there’s risk of crossing the line, it may be best to avoid getting too close to it. It’s probably a minor miracle that there’s only one really blind shot on the course (the drive on nine). I might have liked a few more blind shots and some unusual holes, but you have to give Doak a ton of credit for devising a routing that avoided taking on the risk that this would have entailed on such a tight property.
 
This is certainly one of the finest modern courses and, I think, probably the best at the resort.

Perhaps like other people (or not), my life is characterized by a cycle of hobbies. Road construction when I was three or four, lawn sprinklers when I was five, hurricanes when I was ten. My new hobby for my early teenage years was golf course architecture, an interest that was stimulated by a trip to Barnes & Noble probably sometime early in 1999, where I discovered Tom Doak’s Confidential Guide to Golf Courses. I was immediately hooked and the book became one of my main sources of hobby reading over the next few years.

The Confidential Guide was written in the mid-90s and there’s an intriguing bit at the end of the section on the Pacific Northwest where Doak notes a potential project in sand dunes on the southwestern coast of Oregon and says (paraphrasing) that it would be spectacular…if it ever came to fruition. It had been and in fact was opening right around the time that I was first reading those words. And it was indeed a course unlike any that American golfers had seen, at least in their own country. Set on a plane of clifftop sand dunes, it was something of a cross between Pebble Beach and true links golf. While the course perhaps wasn’t as minimal in its shaping as what became the fashion for its younger siblings and now in the last decade, most new courses, it was also much more naturalistic than almost every course build in the mounding-crazed 80s and 90s.

Still, it wouldn’t be until a few years later, after Pacific Dunes opened and was immediately proclaimed one of the 20 or 30 best courses in the world (a place it still holds in most rankings) that Bandon Dunes really drew my attention. Then they kept adding courses and my desire to go only increased. But finally, about 20 years and a few false starts later, I got to Bandon Dunes in Fall 2022. The success of Bandon led Mike Keiser and associates to develop several similar (and similarly successful) destination resorts, including Sand Valley and Cabot, both of which I saw before I made it to Bandon. But seeing these only increased my desire to see the original.


It’s tough to pick an order in which to write about the Bandon courses. Sensible ideas would be to write about them in the order that I played them or to write about them in the order that I’d rank them, starting with my favorite or least favorite. I’ve decided to write about them in the order that they opened, which also mixes them up nicely as far as my personal rankings. The original course seems—surprisingly to me—to be a bit divisive, with some (including several in my group) thinking that it’s the best course at the resort and easily top 100 in the world and some thinking it’s the weakest and not close to the top 100. For me, it falls in the middle; I preferred Pacific Dunes and Bandon Trails, but I’d probably place it ahead of Old MacDonald and definitely place it ahead of the Sheep Ranch.

Why is Bandon Dunes divisive? Like I said, I have a bit of a hard time understanding this because there are so many strengths. My sense is that it’s the golf architecture purists who are most critical of Bandon Dunes because it still has some of the vestiges of 80s/90s architecture. Three things that I’ve heard are (1) the occasional awkwardness of the routing; (2) the shaping has a bit of the 80s/90s look, with mounding and sharp cuts around several of the greens; (3) that many of these people haven’t seen it in a few years, when there was both a lot more gorse and a lot more rough around the greens, which accentuated the 80s/90s feel of the shaping.

Seeing pictures of the course over the years, it looks like one of the biggest changes at Bandon Dunes has been shaving the areas surrounding all of the greens to fairway height. For the first few years, it looked like the greens were surrounded by rough. Although I never played that version, I could see how this would greatly detract from the course. Because while I agree that some of the shaping around the greens looks a bit manufactured, these green surroundings still play well because they’re all short grass and a miss runs away from the green, leaving interesting, but often difficult pitches. Were the greens surrounded by rough, the course would lose much of its short game interest and a good share of its links feel, which are two of its major strengths.

So I agree with some of what I take to be the criticisms of the critics, although I suspect that the course has also improved substantially over the years and that anyone who hasn’t seen it in awhile might need to give it another look. Bandon Dunes has a few weaknesses, a few more than Pacific Dunes and Bandon Trails. But it has so many strengths. The famous stretch of 4-6 is excellent. So is the back nine, which is certainly in the running for the best nine at the resort.  There are great holes throughout, which I discussed extensively on Golf Club Atlas in a thread on whether Bandon Dunes is overrated (I argued that it isn’t).


Another thing that people point to as a weakness is the opening stretch, which works its way around a ridge at the inland edge of the property. While I don’t think that the mid-length par 4 first is going to be on anyone’s list of great holes here or anywhere else, I found it a perfectly good starting hole. There’s plenty of room off the tee but if you get too aggressive, you can run through the fairway into a bunker. It’s a pretty good climb up to the green but the green is plenty deep and there’s no excuse (save a general lack of golfing ability) for not getting your approach up there and getting away with at least a par.

The par three second has alternate tees; a south tee next to the first green that plays into the deepest aspect of the green and a west tee that requires about a 150 yard walk from the first green and plays into the green’s shallow aspect. Unfortunately we played it both times from the west tee. From here, it might be the weakest hole on the course because of the clunk that it introduces into the routing and because it’s pretty one note—you either get the ball up onto the shallow shelf of the green or it comes back down. I’d have liked to have had the opportunity to play from the south tee, which I strongly suspect makes it a better hole.

I can understand not liking the first two holes but the par 5 third, coming down off the ridge and playing toward the ocean, is solid by any standard. The bunkers on the right are 250-290 out depending on the tees, but there’s plenty of room left, more than you can see. Of course if you do that, you’re further away from the green, which should be reachable for a decent length hitter who places their drive up the right. It’s a solid hole, if not a world-beater.

But each of the next three holes makes a good case as one. The long par fourth has one of the resort’s iconic approach shots as it doglegs right around sand dunes, revealing the ocean for the first time on the approach. I found this to be a bit of an awkward drive because one, the visibility of the fairway from the tee isn’t great and two, while the fairway runs fairly straight in the landing area, the dunes gradually encroach on the right. The latter makes it interesting because the green is well-bunkered at its front-left and you want to approach from the right side of the fairway. It also makes it interesting for anyone who hits a fade because the further you try to drive it, the greater chance that you run out of room on the right.

One hole that I’d never been sure about in all the pictures that I’d seen of Bandon Dunes was the long par 4 fifth. Running along the coast, it’s obviously one of the most photogenic holes anywhere. But with several dunes in the center of the fairway, and what looked like an unrealistically narrow landing area left of them, I wondered if this hole wasn’t a bit of a beautiful mess.

Perhaps there have been a few changes to soften it over the years but not only is the current hole not a mess, it’s absolutely on the short list of best holes at the whole resort. The centerline dunes actually work very well. The first few are a short carry and there’s plenty of room to play to the right of them. Depending on your tees, it’ll be a decent carry to get over all of them but if you do, you’re rewarded with a massively wide fairway.

But there’s one more catch that I didn’t realize; the fairway narrows at about the 270-300 range (closer on the left, further on the right) and if the hole’s playing downwind, you need to be careful not to run through the fairway. So there’s something for everyone off this tee and regardless of your ability, there are several ways that you can play the drive.

The approach, through a narrow gap in the dunes to a skinny but deep green, is also one of the course’s best. But for me it’s the drive—which I came in questioning whether it would be any good and left thinking that it was one of the resort’s best—that makes this a great hole.

Another hole that I came in questioning that turned out great is the par 3 sixth. This hole has always featured in the resort’s promotional material but these pictures made it seem less appealing than it should to me; they showed a green surrounded by artificial-looking shaping and rough.

I don’t know if the shaping has been softened but the rough is certainly gone and the current version of the hole is excellent. The hole seems to follow a classic principle—there’s more room at the front than the back and there’s a little more safety if you hedge short. There’s plenty of safety (although not necessarily easy shots) short of the green but serious trouble long and long-right.

Perhaps the most criticized aspect of Bandon Dunes is the walk from the sixth to the seventh tee. Basically, you have to walk all the way back to the fifth green for the seventh tee. Apparently this is due to the late addition of the piece of land on which the sixth sits to the resort.

But really, you have to be a pretty big routing curmudgeon to be bothered by this. If you play the great links courses in the UK, you have walks like this all the time because they keep building new back tees and unless you’re playing the course at the original 6,000 yards, almost every hole has a 120 yard walkback to the newer tees. The front nine at Bandon does have a few more of these walks than there should be (1-2, 3-4, 6-7). But none is more than about 150 yards. If you’re chatting with others in your group, you won’t even notice that the walk was longer than usual.

And actually, I have more of an issue with the seventh hole itself than the walk to the seventh tee. It’s not a bad hole at all but (1) there’s nothing going on with the drive and (2) the green complex is the height of the course’s 80s/90s-style shaping. It’s heart-shaped with a mound right behind the center of the green, making it difficult to putt from one side of the green to the other. I felt that this green was Bandon Dunes at its most Jerry Matthews.

Unfortunately my picture from the eighth tee does a better job showing my playing partners than the eighth drive (not that they’re its inferiors…). It’s not too difficult a drive; all you have to do is keep your drive under 250, which keeps you short of the main centerline bunker. You can go further if you drive it left of the bunker but the angle to most pins should be better from the right side.

Along with two and seven, I think that the par 5 ninth is a weakness. There’s a cluster of bunkers right in the middle of the hole in the driving zone. Now these are pretty difficult to avoid if you’re trying to play the hole correctly down the middle of the fairway. But the hole doglegs right around mounds that aren’t covered in anything other than short rough and I think the best way to play it is to just play up the rough on the right side.

So it doesn’t work great from a playing perspective. It works even less well from an aesthetic one as both sides of the hole are lined with mounds, which also surround the sides and back of the green. While the seventh green looked like a Bandon Dunes hole with a Jerry Matthews green, the last 200 yards of this hole look like a metro Detroit public course.

Despite the terrible weather in which we played it, I thought that the short par 4 tenth was outstanding. The bunkers in front of the tee are only about a 190 yard carry and there’s endless room right of them. But you really don’t want to drive it over there because more than almost any hole that I’ve seen, the angle into the green is critical here. The green is deep but skinny, with the deepest aspect angling toward the far left side of the fairway. There’s also a dune ridge running along the right side of the green that obscures it completely from the right side of the fairway.

​My pictures show how not to play the hole because I pushed my drive way right and had to come into the green at its shallowest angle over the ridge. Still, good shots go a long way in making up for bad shots and/or bad strategy and after a good 9-iron, my worst drive of the day led to my first birdie.

Eleven follows a theme that we first saw on ten and will see a few more times on the back nine: if you play a sensible, conservative shot from the tee, it isn’t that hard. This hole is only about 385 yards from the standard back tee and there are three bunkers up the left side of the fairway, the main one at 240. Now you could challenge this and potentially have a very short shot into the green. But you should just play out to the right and hit a short iron on. The angle may be a bit worse, but the shot is short enough that for a decent player, this shouldn’t matter.

There’s no way to get around the difficulty of the long par 3 twelfth. The green curves around a bunker at its front-left and there’s no pin where there’s much comfort in a miss wide. The back-right of the green has the most space, but trying to hit there brings the danger of running down the hill into the junk behind the green. The safe thing to do here is hedge to the front-middle of the green.

The only exception to this might be if the pin is in the back-left. I wonder if missing aiming at the open area left of the green (where the guy in the grey sweater is) might be best for these pins? Hopefully I can give that a try on some future trip.

There’ nothing too strategically interesting or difficult about the par 5 thirteenth, but it has the wildest fairway on the course (maybe at the resort) and I like it for that. There’s more room left off the tee than you think and if I had one comment about strategy, it’d be to hedge left on either a layup or a shot that goes for the green. That’ll remove some concern about having to play over the dip at the front-right of the green, which can cause trouble if you’re playing to front pins from the right side of the fairway.

Like ten, fourteen is a short par 4 where many will be tempted to go for the green up the right. After all, they were flying it up on the green in the US Amateur.

Well, you’re not playing in the US Amateur. A drive up the right here is one of the biggest sucker plays that I’ve seen on a golf course. Because there are bunkers absolutely everywhere. Now you can avoid all of that if you can carry it 270. But far fewer people can do that than think they can do it.
​
What you should do here is hit a driver or three-wood over the first bunker on the left (about a 210 carry). It’s wide-open out there and you’ll have a clear look straight into the deepest aspect of the green. This hole should be pretty easy but I’m sure that egos cause quite a few big numbers.

The par 3 fifteenth caused the players all kinds of trouble in the 2020 US Amateur as they got aggressive and went over the back of the green. Of all the places around all of the greens at Bandon Dunes, long, long-left, and long-right here are among the worst. It’s entirely possible to go back and forth and make an X if you hit your first shot into one of these places.

But the solution seemed so simple to me: hedge to the front-left of the green. While the front-right bunker is obviously not great, there’s plenty of room at the front-left. While the hole was playing downwind for us, my understanding is that it plays into the wind in the summer, which should also help hold the ball here.

Now I understand that planning in golf is often in vain because most of us aren’t consistent enough to follow a plan with much certainty. We often end up hitting it exactly where we aren’t trying to. But it’s not hard to pick one club less. And it’s not hard to aim left of the pin. This is one hole where I think with the right plans, you can lessen your chance of a disaster. And to me, that makes it an excellent one.

The short par 4 sixteenth was another baffling hole in the US Amateur. It was downwind and drivable for almost all of the players, yet there really isn’t enough room to land and hold the ball near the green. But the layup out to the left also left a tricky shot into the shallower aspect of the green and NBC commentator Justin Leonard argued for driving it long and left near the seventeenth tee. It’s probably not how the hole was meant to be played and leaves an awkward pitch, but there’s plenty of room over there and I can see the sense of it.

Of course that’s all irrelevant for 99% of the rest of us…especially when the hole is playing into the wind as it was for us. The ~220 yard carry over the right side of the bunker wasn’t even possible from the regular back tees so it was a matter of picking the correct line out to the left. And I think that the best play here is well out to the left, just short of the rough-covered mound in the distance. That mound is about 260 yards out, so you should be able to manage to carry the first bunker (~210) and stay short of it. It’s true that the angle into the green from here is worse than from closer to the centerline bunkers on the more direct route to the green but to me, there isn’t enough room up the right side to justify going for the better angle. The green is still plenty big enough even from the poor angle out to the left. This is a hole where the reward for the heroic shot doesn’t justify the risk.

​

The last two holes turn down the temperature a bit. The drive on seventeen should be pretty simple: try to hit it about 250 yards and absolutely do not hit it more than 270. That’s because there’s a canyon on the right and a cluster of bunkers up the left pinching the fairway at this distance. The approach is to the deepest and (I’m pretty sure) largest green on the course. Depending on the pin, you could have anywhere between a wedge and a hybrid. Whatever you have, make sure that you’re reasonably precise with the distance because the green is also the course’s most undulating.

Different from the rest of the course, it’s the green that makes this hole. But if anything, the variety is a point in its favor.

No one will mistake the eighteenth hole for a great finish and the mounding around the layup zone on the left gets a bit reminiscent of the ninth hole, but it’s not a bad finish. Not worthy of the rest of the back nine, but I liked it more than the weakest holes on the front.

As I said at the outset, Bandon Dunes probably falls in the middle of the pack for me at the resort. There are a few things that I don’t like, but also several undeniably great holes. One thing that stands out to me about this course is that it exploits the golfer’s ego better than almost any other that I’ve seen. On several holes, there’s a conservative drive that leaves you a very playable approach. But there’s also a hero drive that most won’t pull off, but will still try. That’s especially true because Bandon is a special trip for most, one that they’ve either been waiting to do for a long time or don’t get to do very often. They didn’t come all this way to lay up. And I think that this course exploits that more than the others at the resort.

For me, a tougher issue than comparing Bandon Dunes to the other courses at the resort is how it stacks up compared to some of the other recent Keiser offerings that I've played: the Sand Valley and Cabot courses. Of those four, it’s probably most similar to Cabot Links. They’re both relatively flat and play more like traditional links courses than the Sand Valley courses or Cabot Cliffs. And between those two, I think I slightly prefer Cabot Links. As I noted in my review, Cabot Links has some of the best subtle shaping around its greens that I’ve seen on any course. There’s a bit more variety in the terrain and scenery, the two nines are of more equal strength, and the finish is certainly stronger. Maybe the highs aren’t quite as high, but Cabot Links is more consistent.

As an overall course, Cabot Cliffs reminds me a bit of Bandon Dunes because it also has many great holes and a few weaknesses in both the routing and the individual holes. But Cabot Cliffs also has more dramatic terrain and spectacular scenery than Bandon Dunes. And its great holes, like 16 and 17, are more unique than anything at Bandon Dunes because the wild terrain and the jagged cliff edges afforded opportunities that weren’t available here.

I think that the Sand Valley courses also have a terrain advantage over Bandon Dunes. They remind me more of Bandon Trails, being hilly treks through the woods (but with a lot more open sand). Neither Sand Valley nor Mammoth Dunes have the routing or shaping issues that Bandon occasionally has. But both—and especially Mammoth Dunes—suffer from a lack of editing. Each has at least a few holes where there’s too much going on; excessive width, too many bunkers, over-contoured green complexes, etc.. For its faults, Bandon never feels over done. It’s very tightly designed. That might give the nod to Bandon for me because I give a design points for parsimony. But it’s a tough call, especially with Sand Valley, because the terrain there is better and it also has a handful of world class holes.

This all just goes to show how difficult it is to compare excellent golf courses to each other. There are a lot of different aspects of a course to compare (routing, terrain, greens, design parsimony, etc.), everyone likes different things within each category, and they differ in the weight that they place on each category. But it’s clear to me at least that Bandon Dunes, if not superior to some of the other recent Keiser courses, at least compares favorably to them. And because they all tend to fall in a similar places in the rankings (except Sand Valley, which I think is becoming underrated), near the bottom of the world top 100, I’d continue to defend the position that Bandon Dunes isn’t overrated.

The golf world’s attention was drawn to the west coast of Nova Scotia’s Cape Breton Island a few years back when word spread about the development of a second course. There were two good reasons for this. The first was that it would be designed by Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw, who’ve given us some of the world’s best new courses in the last 30 years. The second (and probably the reason for the first) is that people saw pictures of the absolutely spectacular dunes-and-cliffs site. Not only was there the potential for holes that could rival the cliffside holes at Cypress Point, the site also afforded the opportunity to create some stunning and unique inland holes.

While the cliffside holes are extraordinary as advertised (I’ll say plenty about the now-famous 16th and 17th), the variety of landscapes on this property is an incredible strength and the routing takes advantage of it. There’s a long stretch of coastline and the routing returns to it at several points. There’s also a section of the property with sand dunes next to an inland lake, which we play through twice. The rest of the property is a hilly transition area between the dunes and the forest through which the course weaves in and out. The routing changes direction on almost every hole, which keeps you on your toes, but also prevents you from experiencing the multi-hole beatdown into the wind that you often experience on out-and-back-routed links courses.

So the landscape offers incredible variety and the routing takes advantage of it. The design features one additional element that adds to the variety: an unusual mix of 6 par 3s, 6 par 4s, and 6 par 5s. I’m a bit less convinced about the merits of this. I suppose that par doesn’t really matter and regardless of the wind, a few of these par 5s will play like long (or not even that long) par 4s. Still, I think that the course could use two or three more strong par 4s and stretches of consecutive par 4s that differ from each other. The only consecutive par 4s here are holes two and three.

While the greens contours are similar to those next door in that they’re interesting but not over-the-top, the green surroundings here are quite a bit more challenging. There are several steep run-offs around these greens and in a good wind—which I experienced in both rounds I played and would imagine is quite common—they can be very difficult to hit. And missing can lead to some serious trouble. I suppose that the green complexes here were likely to end up a bit more severe than next door simply because the land is a lot hillier and many green sites needed to be built into heavily sloped areas. Still, I think that a few of the green complexes here could have been toned down a bit, given both the wind and the firmness of the course in the summer.


As on a lot of spectacular courses, the first hole isn’t too spectacular. From the back tees, it’s a very long 580 yard par 5, especially when playing right into the wind. There isn’t too much trouble between the tee and the green, save for one fairway bunker encroaching into the left side of the fairway about 110 yards short of the green and another about 25 yards short.

Continuing southwest into the wind is the stunning 390 yard par 4 second. This gets many people’s nod as the best hole at Cabot Cliffs and for good reason: it’s a unique hole both in its setting and how the hole is shaped into it. We play downhill into a very wide and fairly flat sandy coastal plain. The approach is over a creek that flows out to the sea up into the sand dunes. The green, which is fronted by bunkers carved into a sand dune, is sort-of triangle-shaped, with a wide, lower portion at the front and a narrower, high one at the back.

Now there are options off the tee here which are dictated by the hole location. The left side of the green is blind from all but the left side of the fairway. And the right side of the green is blind from all but the right. So you want to be on the same side of the fairway as the pin, which you can see from the tee, maybe with the assistance of your range finder…unless you are or have the vision of a pilot. While it’s not too hard to place your drive in the middle of this fairway, you have to negotiate the junk along the left or right edge of the fairway to get it into the optimal spot. The wind was blowing a bit too hard for me to be confident enough to try this and I was just happy to hit the fairway.

But it’s a very interesting concept and I think it works well. Wherever you drive it, make sure that you carry your approach up onto the green; if you miss the left side short, you can roll all the way back down into the junk. I suspect that this hole wouldn’t be so hard without wind, but I’m not sure how many are lucky enough to experience that.

The similar length third features a bunker in the middle of the fairway right where you’d want to drive the ball. But it’s probably worth challenging because the green is perched up and a hill with a pretty steep fall-off to the right. You want to make sure that you have a manageable length for your second.

The par 3 fourth has two greens; one on the left that plays over 200 yards and one on the right that plays about 150. The shorter one is clearly the most dangerous. While there’s ample room (even if you can’t see it) short and right of the first green, you must be super-accurate if playing to the second or there’s a decent chance that you’ll go back-and-forth across the green with the next few. There’s more room at the back than the front but you still need a high degree of accuracy. While it isn’t the most exciting hole, I prefer the left green.

While the second is a bit of a subtly great driving hole, the short par 4 fifth is an obviously great one. The scorecard lists it at 330 yards…but that’s aiming at the green and you need about a 300 carry to make that work.

The rest of us get to pick our comfort level with a diagonal carry up to the right and the hole plays more like 360-390 depending on which line we choose.. I’m not sure that I’ve ever seen such a cape style drive where the shot varies so much depending on which line you pick. There’s open fairway well out to the right, but you can probably only go about 200 yards on this line unless you hit a good hook. Then there’s a more uphill carry of about 210 yards over a bunker which in a left-to-right wind is probably the most sensible for most of us. This line would be dangerous for a long hitter because the fairway runs out at about 250-265. They’ll need to go somewhere to the left (it’s about 265 over the bunker short and right of the green), but the fairway is very shallow on the other side.

While the green is large and not particularly interesting, the drive is one of the best that I’ve seen anywhere. I’m fortunate in that the line over the first bunker is just the right carry for me because there isn’t a lot of room for a long hitter to play left of that, unless they can go for the green. Still, they could always lay up to the right and as usual, that’d probably be best for the scorecard…if less fun.

The fifth green also brings us into the sand dunes where we find the entire par 3 sixth. This is a fantastic short hole which looks more punishing than it is, but also ends up being a bit harder than you think it should be once you see what's going on. That’s because the green is large and there’s plenty of room to miss short (you might even be able to putt from the front tees), but it also slopes away and it’s difficult to get it close, unless the pin is in the bowl at the back-right.

We play back away from the ocean into the endless Canadian wilderness on the par 5 seventh. But this is another very good driving hole, where you can get in range with a bold carry up the right side…or run out of space and into the junk up the left. There’s not a lot to say about the rest of the hole but make sure that you carry your approach far enough.

The next two holes, another par 5 and a par 3 are a bit of a weak point. Eight is a solid driving hole where you can get close to the green in two if you pick a bold line off the tee but again, the rest of the shots aren’t that interesting. Then we have an awkward walk of about 150 yards up around the first green and the second tee to a downhill par 3 that plays all of 120 yards. It’s a pet peeve of mine to have a walk from a green to a tee that’s longer than that next hole and this one, while similar in concept, is inferior to the fourteenth hole next door. But at least it’s just as beautiful.

The next hole, a long par 5 with the ocean all the way down the left, was one of my favorites despite two incredibly disappointing attempts at playing it. First of all, I just love the look of the short grass along the edge of the cliff. But for most of the landing area, there are bunkers ‘protecting’ you from running over the cliff. More of an issue for me was a cluster of bunkers about 280 down the right side. This hole is downwind with the prevailing wind and it’s a challenge to fit one between the cliff right and the bunker cluster left.

It’s quite possible to go for the green if you hit a good one because it can roll out forever—one of my playing partners’ drives went about 400 yards. But if you’re laying up, you must be careful to stay well short of the inlet about 60 yards short of the green. It’s all downhill and downwind, so you need to lay back further than you think.

The par 4 eleventh takes us back uphill and inland, past the new vacation homes of Sydney Crosby and other Canadian elites. It’s pretty easy to tell what you should do here—hug the bunker right because the hilltop green opens up on that side. It’s best to err short here because you want no part of what’s over the green.

While the 200+ yard (up to 245) looks straight-forward enough, I found it baffling to play. You can’t really run one onto the green here because the land slopes away to the left. And there was almost no way to land one on the green and hold it there given the wind direction (down) and the firm ground. I’d be interested to try to play some shots around the right side of the bunker, but in addition to there not being much room to do this, it didn’t look like there was enough tilt toward the green. But then again, I suppose short and left isn’t too bad.

Thirteen is a bit of a breather hole with plenty of width and a much more receptive green, if you carry the rise in front of it.

Fourteen is a simple-looking ~160 yard par 3…but it didn’t play simple. The issue here again was that the green was so firm that it was difficult to carry on and hold it there.

The four hole run home immediately became famous when the course opened and for good reason. The par 5 fifteenth is a thrill. The main feature is a bunker in the middle of the fairway, which requires about a 260 carry from the tips. I suppose that you’re offered a good view of the green if you keep your drive in the area left of it…but none of us was bold enough to try to hit it there.

Carry it or miss it a bit right and your ball will run well down the fairway (at least with the standard down wind), possibly to a career long drive. From here you’ll have a blind shot that asks only one question: can you carry a centerline bunker 50 yards short of the center of the green? If yes, pick a club that can just carry that and go for it. If not, lay well back. You probably can’t hold the green with your second, but the bunkers behind the green aren’t too bad.

The par 3 sixteenth is just extraordinary. If you’re trying to keep a score together—which I was in my second round—it’s one of the most terrifying shots that you’ll ever see. But it was, to this point, the single most spectacular.

There’s some room to bail out short and left, but it’ll be very difficult to keep your pitch on the upper left side of the green from here. If the flag is on the precipice at the right side of the green, your score would probably be better off if you played over here and pitched on, although I could understand why no one would ever do that. You didn’t come all this way and pay all this money not to try that shot.

The only shot that I’ve ever seen that might outdo the tee shot on sixteen is the tee shot from the tips on seventeen. I can hardly imagine a more difficult-looking shot, uphill and over a massive cliff, with no view of the landing area. I moved up a set of tees from where I could at least see a little of the fairway.

If you’re a long hitter, the best way to play the hole is to bomb one along the cliff. While into the wind, it’s only between a 200 and 240 yard carry depending on the line and if you carry even part of the cliff, your ball will likely bound forward near the green. For those of us who don’t hit a long ball and are too scared to try this shot, there’s plenty of room out to the left (and, helpfully, a spotter).

But unless the pin is in the back of the green, the approach off a layup is very tough, unless you can put a lot of spin on the ball, your wedge approach will roll out to the back of the green. Alternatively, you can get clever and play a bump-and-run around the bunker on the left—the land here is contoured to feed the ball onto the green. If you pull it off just right, I think you can keep it on the front of the green. But it’d take some experimentation to make that work. Just hit one up on the green, make your 4, and go to the next tee.

It’s a puzzling hole if you layup but I think that’s because it’s meant to heavily favor those who go for the green and pull it off. Given the shot required to do that, I have no problem with it. This is one of the greatest short par 4s that I've seen.

The par 5 eighteenth is a bit of a mirror image of the tenth, but of course plays much longer because it’s into the wind. Like ten, you need to fit one between bunkers and ocean—a fade off the left bunkers would work great.

​The approach is similar too except this time, you need to be able to carry within about 90 yards of the center of the green to carry the cove. Otherwise you might want to play out to the left because you’ll be a long way back if you lay up short. It’s always best to err a bit short here because the green narrows its back.

I mentioned in my review of Cabot Links that the starter there told me that people’s preferences split about 50/50 between Cabot Links and Cabot Cliffs. That was before I had played Cabot Cliffs and I was surprised because Cabot Cliffs looked much more spectacular. And it is. But after playing it, I think I can understand why many prefer Cabot Links. Unless the wind is down, this is a much harder course than Cabot Links. There are more opportunities for lost balls and the green complexes are more difficult.

It was also windier here both days than at Cabot Links. Now we played both morning rounds there and both afternoon rounds here and I can’t rule out that it just got more windy in the afternoon. But much of Cabot Cliffs is more than 75 feet above sea level while Cabot Links is just 15-30 feet above and I suspect that it’s usually more windy here. Cabot Cliffs is plenty wide enough to handle the wind but the combination of the wind and the steeper slopes throughout the course make it much more difficult to control the ball here. Still, the course record is much lower here than at Cabot Links (60 here vs. I think 65 or 66 for Cabot Links) so the course isn’t always more difficult.

As far as judging the courses, it would come down to how you weigh the importance of the spectacular vs. the subtle. This property afforded Coore and Crenshaw some spectacular opportunities and there’s no doubt that they took advantage of them. Cabot Links simply has nothing to compare to the sixteenth or seventeenth holes. I'm not sure that any architects could have done a better job with the extraordinary moments on the property than Coore and Crenshaw did.

But there’s not a lot like the little humps and bumps that you find around the greens at Cabot Links. I loved the shaping on and especially around the greens at Cabot Links and am always especially impressed when architects are able to create something really interesting on modest land. So I think I give the nod to Cabot Links. But I'm also not sure that you could have done that here--this property is quite hilly while Cabot Links is mostly gently rolling or flat. There were always going to have to be some pretty big slopes around these greens. I suppose the challenge here was the opposite; yes you can build a lot of spectacular-looking holes, but can you keep them from being too severe?

I think that Coore and Crenshaw succeeded in building a course that isn't too severe and you have to give them a lot of credit for that. I can think of a few highly regarded living architects who may have let things get a bit out of control on this property. The merit of something is not determined just by what it does and does well, but what it doesn’t do and could have done badly. Being a perfect 10 for beauty doesn't hurt either.