Ten rounds,
up close.

The Course

A public short links 25 minutes north of Dublin Airport, sitting on honest seaside ground just across the road from Portmarnock. It's not on any world ranking and it isn't trying to be — this is a walkable loop of wide fairways, true-rolling greens, and enough links character to feel like you've actually arrived in Ireland.

With a par of 65, there are no long par-5s to grind out and no forced carries to make a jet-lagged body wince. A few par-3s play a genuine club or two more than the yardage suggests when the wind comes off the Irish Sea, which it usually does. Expect four hours, give or take, and a beer at the clubhouse before the drive back into the city.

The Course

Castlerock's lesser-known but more rugged loop. The Bann runs through bigger, more severe dunesland than the championship Mussenden course next door — sharper contours, wilder fairways, the kind of nine that punches well above its short-course reputation.

Nine holes, walkable in under two hours, with views back across the river to Mussenden Temple. A quick round on a piece of property that wouldn't be out of place on a ranked 18-hole routing if it ran twice.

The Course

The Strand's front nine is on every short-list of the best opening nines in the British Isles. "Tubber Patrick," the 425-yard par-4 first, tees off from a high plateau with the entire front nine laid out below you — a sight that routinely drops group conversation to zero. What follows is a march through enormous dunes that would feel at home on any top-10 world ranking.

The back nine — historically the course's weak point — has just been rebuilt by Mackenzie & Ebert, fully opening to the public on June 1, 2026. So we'll be among the first groups through the new routing with proper summer conditions. The reconstruction extends the dunes experience across all eighteen and, if early reviews hold, moves the Strand into the conversation with Portrush and RCD.

The Course

Harry Colt's 1932 routing at Royal Portrush is regarded by many modern architects as his greatest work — and after Mackenzie & Ebert's updates for the 2019 Open, the Dunluce Links is arguably the most dramatic course on the Open rota. It has hosted the Championship twice in the past six years (2019, 2025), and the walk from the 4th tee to the 18th green contains more great holes than most links have in their entire routing.

What makes Portrush different from its close neighbor Royal County Down: the land is hillier, the views are more varied (Dunluce Castle from the 5th, the coast from half the course), and the greens are more sophisticated. RCD overwhelms you with pure linksiness; Portrush overwhelms you with theater.

The Course

Universally known as the Wee Course, the Annsley Links shares its dunesland with the Championship course at Royal County Down — same mountains behind, same gorse, same bearded bunkers, just shorter holes and more forgiving angles. Harry Vardon laid out a version of it in 1907, and it's been tweaked over the decades without losing its character.

Don't mistake "shorter" for "easy." Wind off the Mourne Mountains can push a wedge fifteen yards offline, and a handful of the par-3s play a full two clubs more than their card yardage on a breezy day. The Wee is the ideal tune-up before the Championship — same rhythm, same sightlines, lower stakes.

The Course

Old Tom Morris laid out the original Royal County Down for £4 in 1889. Harry Vardon and Seymour Dunn refined it over the following decades, and Donald Steel and Martin Ebert have made careful updates more recently, but the essential character is Morris's. The course sits between the Mourne Mountains and Dundrum Bay on what is widely considered the purest stretch of golfing land in the world.

The signature feature — the bearded bunkers — are exactly what they sound like: sand traps with marram grass and heather growing out of the lips, visible from every fairway like shaggy wounds in the dunes. A blind tee shot on the 9th over a dune called Snout's Point is one of the most famous shots in golf. The par-3 4th, with the Mournes as a backdrop, appears on every "greatest holes" list ever written.

This is a course that does not reward comfort. You will hit shots to greens you cannot see, from lies you've never played, with winds that do not behave like wind you know. Accept it, swing through, and trust that Morris put the hole where it belongs.

The Course

The clubhouse at Ardglass is a 15th-century castle — literally the oldest building in daily use as a golf clubhouse anywhere in the world. The course itself is a quirky cliffside links that runs along a rocky headland jutting into the Irish Sea, with several holes playing directly over the cliff edge. It's not a championship test, but a course you remember.

The opening stretch is the scenic centerpiece: holes 2, 3, and 11 all hug the clifftops with the sea on your right and, on a clear day, the Isle of Man on the horizon. The routing works back inland through the middle of the round before returning to the coast for a strong finish.

The Course

Narin & Portnoo has existed as a club since 1931, but the course most people now play is effectively a Gil Hanse original. Hanse and his team spent the better part of four years (2016–2020) reshaping fairways, rebuilding greens, and restoring the routing to take full advantage of the dunesland above Gweebarra Bay. The result is a course that felt new overnight and has been climbing the rankings ever since.

The routing is an out-and-back across some of the most remote golfing terrain in Europe. The front nine climbs out along the bay; the back nine returns along the shoreline with the Atlantic on one side and fields of gorse on the other. Very few bunkers relative to its neighbors — Hanse lets the land itself do the defending.

The Course

Cruit — pronounced "Critch" — is a nine-hole course on a small peninsula off the Donegal coast, reached from the mainland by a single-lane bridge. Designed by Michael Doherty (the head pro at City of Derry) in 1986, it's short, quirky, and has no business being on a professional golfer's radar. And yet it is widely called one of the best nine-hole courses in the world.

If you haven't already scrolled this page, stop reading now. Seriously. Half the joy of Cruit Island is the first look. All you need to know: it's nine holes, it's 2,800 yards, it's right on the Atlantic, and there's a car-horn rule on the 1st because the road crosses the fairway. Everything else is a gift.

The Course

St Patrick's sits on what may be the largest stretch of true dunesland in Ireland — 300+ acres of sand hills above Sheephaven Bay that had been two mediocre courses (Hackett's Maheramagorgan and O'Haire's Trá Mór) before the Casey family acquired the land in 2012. Tom Doak and lead associate Eric Iverson spent nearly a decade designing the current routing, and the course opened in June 2021 to immediate critical acclaim.

What Doak does here is let the land speak. Wide fairways, naturalised bunkering that looks like weathered scars, and greens that follow the existing contours rather than being perched on top of them. It's different in character from Portrush and RCD — less vertical, more expansive. The dunes are bigger. The fairways are wider. The greens are larger. And somehow it plays harder than any of those numbers suggest.

It reached the world top-50 in under four years. By the time this trip happens, it'll be higher.