Mount Juliet Estate, Ireland
Measuring no larger than South Carolina in square miles, Ireland certainly seems like a compact golf destination. But its roads are ribbony and its top courses recede to the country’s perimeter like numbers on a clock face. For less-experienced visitors to the Emerald Isle, the question can be daunting: Where to start? For a […]
Ballyliffin Golf Club, Ireland
The Second Coming of Ballybunion? Years ago I subscribed to the New Yorker and it was then that I first became familiar with the name Herbert Warren Wind, the sportswriter. I was attracted not only by the clarity of his writing but by the mellifluosity of his name, which had as good a ring […]
County Sligo Golf Club (Rosses Point), Ireland
Perhaps more than any other links course, County Sligo Golf Club—or Rosses Point, as it is more commonly known—is infused and inspired by its natural setting. This charmer in the northwest of Ireland is surrounded by the romantic scenery that William Butler Yeats, the greatest of Irish poets, made famous: the semicircle of sea, […]
Glasson Golf Club, Ireland
The Glasson Golf Club starter asked whether I would mind pairing up with two “society” golfers, Sunday plonkers named Jack and Jimmy who had motored out from Dublin that morning with their itinerant golf gang. For me it was the end of a six-day tour of demanding Irish linksland courses on the coastlines north […]
Donegal Golf Club (Murvagh), Ireland
Donegal marks the entry to Ireland’s Northwest Passage through a land that’s surely the most desolate and dramatic in all the Isle. A windblown landscape of smoke-blue mountains and forlorn moors that sweep along towering cliffs above the Atlantic, this terrain is so sere and stark, sheep cannot even graze here. Against this rugged […]
Ardglass Golf Club, Ireland
The 1st tee of Ardglass Golf Club backs up the clubhouse, a nearly 700-year-old castle, and points the golfer toward a prospect as exhilarating as it is dangerous: a drive over 40 feet of imposing black cliff bordered by the Irish Sea on the left. Add first-tee jitters and loitering spectators to this mix and […]
Tralee Golf Club, Ireland
The elderly gentleman clapped his hands and signaled thumbs-up as he chugged by in a golf cart on the 12th fairway of Tralee Golf Club. Considering I had just played a 9-iron lay-up and still sat 100 yards shy of the green on this long par 4, I wondered if he were complimenting me […]
The Island Golf Club, Ireland
It all began with four men in a boat. The year was 1887, in the small village of Malahide just north of Dublin, Ireland. The crew was comprised of a lawyer, a brewery owner and two bankers. They were good friends, this intrepid foursome, confirmed bachelors and golf addicts. For some time, each had […]
Waterville Golf Links, Ireland
Jack Mulcahy, born in Ireland and self-made in America, returned to his native country in the 1950s intending to pursue a gentleman’s sporting life. His love of fishing brought him to Waterville, an eyebrow of a town on Ballinskelligs Bay renowned for its sea trout and salmon fishing, its bird hunting and its immense […]
Old Head Golf Links, Ireland
You’re a serious golfer. You have skirted the clifftops at Pebble Beach, maneuvered around the giant sandhills at Ballybunion, genuflected to the golf gods at St. Andrews. If you haven’t yet been to those meccas, you’ve read and dreamed about them. In your wildest fantasies, however, you couldn’t have imagined a golf course as striking […]
