The exact year is lost to me, but in the late Nineties, I was in my rookie year of playing the Irish links cathedrals such as Ballybunion and Lahinch when I first heard about a remote Irish course at the farthest western reaches of County Mayo, a dreamscape of raw oceanic dunes thought to be the highest in all of golf.
Like Tom Watson and legions of Yanks before me, I was enthralled by the overwhelming natural beauty and challenge of those historic links in the Southwest that still attract the majority of foreign hackers. But the local scouts promised there was a more rugged (and cheaper) experience farther up the West Coast in tiny Belmullet, something perhaps less steeped in holy tradition and crested burgundy sweaters, a low-pomp, majestic community treasure that was quickly becoming an underground sensation — Carne Golf Links.
It took me another year or two before I gained the courage to make the four-hour, driving/screaming-on-the-left journey west from Dublin to County Mayo’s tiny country roads, a route, like most in Ireland, dotted with inviting small towns full of woolens shops and brightly-painted pubs standing like Crayolas in the box.
In bustling Ballina (pop. 11,000), one of Europe’s best salmon streams, the brisk River Moy, attracts patient gentlemen in ties and four-layer Nylon waders. In the Mayo countryside you can smell the vast fields of peat moss, the ancient fuel of a dwindling rural Ireland. (Such 10,000-year-old bogs make up five percent of the world’s surface yet sequester more carbon dioxide than all the planet’s forests. Harvesting it contributes to global warming.)
Cruising carefully through Crossmolina, Bangor Erris and the windfarms of Bellacorick, you could easily get stuck (pleasantly, for the tourist) in a two-lane traffic snarl caused by a Gaelic football game — some of the local clubs date to the 1880s — or maybe a border collie sheep herding competition on a sun-splashed green farm.
Just as the map assured me there was hardly any dry Ireland left to navigate, I finally ventured onto the Mullet Peninsula, with the Blacksod and Broadhaven Bays on either side, an area known as the Gaeltacht, a region where Irish Gaelic is still spoken by the older working class and kept alive in schools and on radio farm reports.
Wondering where they’d hidden the world-class golf grounds, I circled through the roundabout at Belmullet, whose hardware stores and fish-and-chips dives seem busier than what 1,100 residents could muster, missed the small sign for Carne (outside town about four miles), and climbed a narrow road past some newer vacation homes, a cemetery and some red-dyed sheep, through an unassuming but stylish stone front gate, and ultimately to a modest sloped parking lot that in two decades of Carne visits went from VW vans and Fords to elegant tour buses and Range Rovers. That day the accents of those lacing up their spikes might have come from Galway and Cork – today, more like Atlanta, Stockholm and Tokyo.
Even the mighty Atlantic is largely hidden from the car park, so you’re hardly wowed by anything as you trudge uphill past the clubhouse, a two-story, slightly beige structure far removed from the glass-and-steel monuments that the golf boom brought to some Irish courses two decades later, taking note that the dining room on the second floor has great views and life-affirming seafood chowder. Desperate for golf, you retreat downstairs outside and just steps away, in a cozy bunker built into the dunes to shield it from the hellacious winds, you find the wee pro shop and perhaps the charming GM, Fiona Togher, a born Londoner who is a cousin to Sex Pistol (and now Trumper) Johnny Rotten and who could probably run all of Carne blindfolded. More from her later.
Perhaps the finest work of the revered Irish golf architect, Eddie Hackett
Finally, you have taken out 195 euros to enter the kingdom and you walk through a short tunnel, into the beckoning light and, upon climbing three more steps to the first tee, you smile and understand why you’ve made this trip.
These are not the gentle razor-cut links of England we often see in July during the Open Championship. Before you is a panorama of green-and-golden thrills, on what looks like a stormy sea covered in eons of sand and seagrass. This is open-mouthed amazement. Yet, stunning as the first launch pad may be, it’s just a tease.
As you crest the first fairway of the original 18 holes, designed by Ireland’s most prolific architect, Eddie Hackett, you see canyons of wild dunes that require lateral mountaineering skills when you stray from the middle. Wayward souls have abandoned thousands of balls in these rugged hills rather than risk a broken ankle on something unplayable, unfindable. Carne chairman, Gerry Maguire, says that from the parking lot elevation, which is already above sea level, Carne’s mightiest dunes rise at least 165 feet or nearly 12 stories high.
While not for a moment suggesting that Ballybunion or Lahinch is a mere stroll in mum’s garden, Carne feels more like rigorous athletic hiking that just happens to involve golf. If this place had no golf holes and were moved to Anywhere, USA, it would be a state park with a waiting line the length of Rory’s drives. Don’t feel guilty if during your round you feel drawn to call timeout and just bask in the solitude of these giant amphitheaters of fescue and marram seagrass and contemplate joy or the Electoral College.
The now-departed Jim Finnegan, whose three golf travel books on Ireland, Scotland and England & Wales belong on your bookshelf, wrote in 1996, “From the 1st tee to the 18th green, [Carne] is all that one could ever yearn for. With the exception of Ballybunion and perhaps Royal County Down, no dunescape in Ireland is more majestic than this wild stretch along the Atlantic coast of Mayo…[It is] the single most remote great course in the entire British Isles.” Never one to brag, Hackett himself said, “ultimately there will be no better links in the country.”
The superlatives have not changed much in the past 25 years – okay, Tom Doak’s new St. Patrick’s Links at Rosapenna is certainly a worthy rival — but Carne hasn’t created its vast following by simply pursuing rankings.
To understand why many of us keep returning year after year, you needn’t go further than the definitive book on Carne, Ancestral Links (2009) by John Garrity, a humble, skilled and quite tall writer I know from our time at Sports Illustrated. This Kansas City guy is greeted around Belmullet like a returning soldier because he captured the spirit of the tiny town and its golf-enchanted leaders just as they got hit with the Great Recession, when Carne and Belmullet’s economic survival were very much in doubt. Also, the Irish still appreciate good writing.
Part memoir, part travelogue, the book chronicles how some two dozen local farmers, aided by one family’s serendipitous land holdings on the environmentally sensitive seashore, spent seven years with designer Eddie Hackett carving the links out of the unforgiving terrain, using mainly rakes and shovels rather than an unaffordable armada of machinery.
The course first opened in 1995, with nine holes on the least-rugged eastern portion of the property – the holes might be easier than the rest, but few call them easy – and a trailer serving as the pro shop. The inestimable Mary Walsh sat at an outside table to collect your green fee and the man presiding over it all was then the director of Erris Tourism, Eamon Mangan, a living but somewhat legendary figure whose kindness and indefatigable spirit is known throughout Irish golf.
Eamon Mangan helped bring Carne to life and guided it through tough times
“The thing about Eamon,” writes Garrity, “was that he never seemed to be in a hurry, and yet he got more done in a day than most men accomplish in a week.” Hackett had seen to it that Mangan would serve as both Carne’s project manager and his design apprentice, no doubt recognizing that his contacts within the community, attention to detail and emotional commitment would ensure success.
“If not for Eamon,” said Carne’s bookkeeper, Martina Mills, “there wouldn’t be a Carne.” (Eamon’s brother, Michael, was also instrumental, providing the one-seventeenth share in some agriculturally poor land that, after convincing other farmers to sell, would become mighty Carne.)
Hackett, too, was an endlessly patient, devoutly religious man (in church almost every day) who was truly the Johnny Appleseed of Irish golf, going from town to town, often by rail, designing for just hundreds of quid such memorable links as Connemara, Waterville and Enniscrone, while refurbishing many dozens of others. A small man, Hackett had overcome tuberculosis as a child and meningitis in the Fifties during a career that included golf writing for Dublin papers, club making, golf instruction and a club pro resume that took him from Royal Dublin to Portmarnock, with even a stop in South Africa.
A classic golf design minimalist before the term was fashionable, Hackett fell in love with the Carne property because so many inspiring potential greens and fairways just naturally presented themselves, and they weren’t just predictably laid out and back from the clubhouse along parallel ridges, but in surprising nooks and valleys facing all directions. Consequently, nothing seems contrived on a Hackett course, as the holes naturally flow like water across the primordial dunes. At almost 80, Hackett would always walk while surveying his canvass, wearing an oilskin coat and rubber Wellingtons and would lie on his back to shimmy under farmers’ barbed wire. (Another brilliant account of Carne’s birth and Hackett’s artistry can be found in Links of Heaven (2007, Richard Phinney and Scott Whitley).
Carne was Hackett’s last work, and many believe his very best, before his death in 1996.
The second nine opened to adoring reviews in that same year, with Irish admirers saying Hackett had found holes on the more mountainous back side that had not even appeared to those most familiar with the land.
The best hole is probably the 17th, a beastly and beloved, 423-yard par four, with deep ravines on either side of a bending fairway, so stubborn that, while living in Belmullet, Garrity took it on as his Moby Dick, trying mightily to break 90 on just that one hole by playing it six times in a row with three balls on each trip. Here’s Garrity: The seventeenth is a polished ridge of green, bent like a boomerang, transversing the blistered terrain of the Carne banks. Deep pools of shadow surround islands of Marram grass; pale craters wink like reflections of the moon.
Hackett’s original No. 17 has bedeviled a generation of Carne’s disciples
In a dozen rounds over five years, he had not been able to make par or birdie. I won’t dare give away the ending, but it’s an enchanting dissection of a menacing golf challenge and the triumphs and insecurities we all share on those love-hate holes.
A few years passed and Carne’s leaders thought something might be done with the land left over in the original 260-acre parcel that Hackett thought was just too extreme for his tastes. American golf architect and Carne life member Jim Engh, who had some experience with mountainous layouts in Colorado, was asked to do a conceptual design for nine more Carne holes. He did so, but Ireland’s financial woes discouraged the club from new construction, so the story goes, and the plans sat until they were handed over to an up-and-coming Scottish architect, Ally McIntosh, who had a mere 200,000 euro budget, which at some American turf palaces would build you about one solid golf hole.
The new Engh/McIntosh routing debuted in 2013 as the Kilmore Nine, which now provides Carne with all the advantages and dilemmas of having 27 holes of wildly scenic golf. Players can tackle each nine separately, play the original Hackett 18, add the Kilmore Nine to either of the Hackett nines, or try to successfully navigate a composite course called the Wild Atlantic Dunes that over a decade later is confusing enough that even John Garrity, on the phone, couldn’t get it right a few weeks ago. (For the record, Chairman Gerry Maguire says the composite course is: Hackett 10 through 16, Kilmore 5 through 9, then 1 through 4, and closing with Hackett 17 and 18. But seriously, on your first attempt, try playing with a Carne regular or find a caddie who can decipher the signage. Alert relatives. Take a flare.) A very detailed summary of the Kilmore Nine, by golf architect and author John Strawn, can be found here: https://www.google.com/search?q=john%20strawn%20kilmore%20a%20position and for perhaps the best video playing guide to Carne, try Kevin Markham’s Carne Golf Links Video Review (Long)
The dilemma with every 27-hole course, Strawn suggests, is that rarely do two nines rise up and indisputably become THE TRUE COURSE, stoking the reputation, rankings and member-love that come with a coherent traditional 18. The advantages, certainly, are more variety and challenge for the players, more money in the till and the ease of doing maintenance on any nine without irritating customers.
Carne’s new nine, as most call it, is exacting and spectacular. Everyone should play it at least twice, marveling at the par-3 pinnacle of No. 2, where, depending on the wind, one could logically take a driver or wedge. But many members who are average hackers think some of the holes are too extreme. “There are just too many blind or obscured shots,” one long-time member told me. “It’s more to impress the (course) raters. The Hackett course is better and more fair.” Full disclosure: I’m an international member of the Belmullet Golf Club, which has rights to play Carne, but this take on the new nine, now 12 years old, is hardly controversial any longer.
If you make it to Carne and don’t come as a loud Dallas foursome lamenting the Cowboys, do yourself a favor and see if a Carne regular is available to join you. Do not under any circumstances play slowly – Yanks have a poor reputation for this – and just hope you get paired with members Jim, Helen, Kay, Rose Mary, Oisin, Cathal, Ciaran, Donal, Declan, Mixie, Cilian, Diarmuid, Liam, Peadar or Cormac. All the others are known philatelists.
A warm September afternoon and the ageless smooth swing of Jim Brown
The September afternoon turned astonishingly blue, warm and calm as Carne boardmember Jim Brown, 78, pulled out a Srixon “2” that he played with the entire day (I swear), his fifth round (he swears) with the same ball.
“I’m a frugal Scotsman from Glasgow,” explained the self-effacing Brown, whose rhythmic, cocked-wrist swing kept him out of Hackett’s dense rough all day, freeing him up to guess where I’d hit mine.
“That wasn’t your best,” he once offered, charitably, as I dribbled another drive into a fast-developing two-club wind. Ever the club ambassador, Jim would pick up litter, provide Irish history, find lost balls and walk a football field to return a lost wedge to a grateful Canadian.
He was concerned about his putting and, just two months before our election, America. “All of Europe, all the world, will suffer if Trump is in power again,” he said, without rancor, echoing what literally every Irish citizen said to me, if the talk turned to politics. “Frankly, we just don’t understand it over here. What is happening to America?”
He apologized profusely for taking a phone call during the round, but a woman was checking on the health of Jim’s wife. The Carne community is understandably tight. We soon bumped into Chairman Gerry Maguire’s petite athletic wife, Helen Comiskey, who was caddying for some visitors and looked like a marathoner with clubs.
My typical Carne round – I’m lucky to break 85 in Ireland – became transcendent when I freakishly parred John Garrity’s nemesis, the Hackett 17th, with a quintuple-breaking 15-foot putt off two ridges and a gnome. I floated back to the pro shop.
Carne survived the Great Recession and Covid, but with great help
The aforementioned Fiona Togher, whose background is in bank finance and Shell Oil, was deep in her ledgers at an un-windowed office when I asked about the struggles of Carne and the remarkable effort it has taken to keep it afloat.
“The course was really born in the 1980s, when the recession seemed even worse than the one that would come in 2008-2009,” she recounted. “Kids were leaving for Australia, England, the U.S….Eddie Hackett designed the course for expenses only (and Eamon Mangan would have to remind him to actually seek reimbursement) … We stand on their shoulders today.”
When Fiona arrived in 2017, the income from local members of the Belmullet Golf Club (about 50-60,000 euros annually) and about 2,500 yearly rounds from visitors was simply not enough. “We couldn’t afford the machinery, the wages. We had 180,000 euro short-term debt on everything from fertilizer to carpenters. People had no money coming in, but we were blessed. Not one of our creditors took us to court.”
That same year they closed the new Kilmore nine. “I questioned myself,” said Fiona, “but it was the right thing to do financially.” She did a marketing and sales plan and asked Failte Ireland (the national tourism board) to include Carne at trade shows and the huge annual PGA Show in Orlando in 2018. Golf writers such as Garrity and Tom Coyne, plus the podcasters at “No Laying Up,” among many others, sang Carne’s praises. In 2018, visitor rounds doubled to 5,000, the next year 8,000 and 10,500 by the 2020 PGA Show in January.
Then COVID came in March and they closed the course. “It was brutal laying off people,” Fiona said. “We couldn’t even pay for our new carpet. We told all our American advanced bookings that we’d give them a credit, and about 80 percent took that, so that greatly helped. Then Tom Coyne did a COVID diary podcast at Carne in April with Gerry (Maguire, the Chairman), and others, for The Golfer’s Journal magazine and we got thousands of emails. The global golf community responded. I brought in my two daughters to help respond to all the online merchandise buys…We sold 30 international memberships. It was really humbling. I couldn’t thank people enough.” And a grateful Maguire adds: the efforts saved the jobs of 30 people.
Carne reopened in June 2020, but closed again at Christmas and didn’t reopen until July 2021 – “a two-year nightmare for us,” said Fiona. In 2022, actor and comedian Bill Murray and his brothers showed up at Carne during an Irish golf journey (on YouTube). Mike Keiser, owner of the Bandon Dunes golf resort in Oregon, offered “help and advice.” Tim Boyle, owner of Columbia Sportswear, fell in love with Carne and has sponsored some of its biggest tournaments. And in 2024, Irish Ryder Cup hero Paul McGinley stopped by with a Sky TV crew to kick off the first episode of something called Golf’s Greatest Holes, plus Fiona was named Irish golf’s manager of the year.
The fairy tale would have ended there had global inflation not gut-punched golf.
“Electricity went up 80 percent, fertilizer 60 percent,” lamented Fiona, just a few months ago. “A mower costs 70,000 euros. The core costs of the club have gone up 60 to 70 percent.”
That’s why, in part, a visitor’s green fee is now roughly $200 (USD) — still a discount from Ballybunion ($411), Royal Portrush ($468) or Royal County Down ($517), but concerning to the proletariat nonetheless.
Yet, I doubt I would keep coming back to Carne if it were only about phenomenal golf, and little else.
But Carne lovers also rave about welcoming remote Belmullet
Carne also means the charms of Belmullet jewels like the Talbot Hotel, a 31-room boutique affair with eclectic tastes, an inviting seafood restaurant and front desk staff (yo Emma!) who sent me to the wildlife-rich, sparkling waters of the Inishkea Islands and farther off, Rinroe Beach. The friendly faces sometimes include owner Tommy Talbot’s three daughters, who are 16, 18 and 20. A Blacksod native and newcomer to golf who has already won some Carne competitions, Talbot houses lots of golfers from May to October, some of whom return annually like Puffins to the shore.
And a huge number of those golfers will wander down the street to the exceptional Phoenix Chinese restaurant, the first (2004) in Belmullet, or the lively intimate McDonnell’s pub, where musicians from across the West regularly turn the place into a churning cauldron of Irish folk jam sessions.
On my last visit, owner Padraig Conroy, an undertaker and guitarist with his band, Blind Tom & The Navigators – they’ve toured in Wisconsin, Kansas and much of Europe — introduced my son and I to three Finnish women who were in town for a conference on “dark skies” tourism. Within minutes, Conroy was strumming some fiery political tune – “We’re an (Irish) Republican bar,” – with two Canadian golfers and then took my son behind the bar for a lesson in properly dispensing a pint of Guinness.
“How often does this sort of improvisational sing-along with total strangers happen,” I asked Conroy.
“Most of the time,” he laughed, thinking the question odd. “It’s what people want. It’s what people need. It’s the West of Ireland. It’s Belmullet.”
And that it is.
Bruce Selcraig is a former U.S. Senate investigator whose work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, Harper’s and The Atlantic, among others. selcraig@swbell.net