Every golf journey should be fueled by a sense of anticipation — invigorating weather, great company, a promising new swing thought. And if you’re lucky, one day you might find the anticipation overwhelming as you wind along a tiny gut-clenching country road in the farthest coastal reaches of County Donegal in pursuit of perhaps the world’s finest 9-hole golf course.
Ireland’s Cruit Island Golf Club, a mighty links surrounded on three sides by the churning Atlantic, gives new meaning to remote golf. This unpretentious delight is guarded from the hordes by a cardiac-arresting, five kilometer, one-lane affair with blind hills and turns that has you praying oncoming drivers aren’t lost in their cell phones or beer. Barely seven feet wide in spots, with occasional patches of grass in the middle, a winding nameless path off R259 forces neighborly locals and golf tourists in rental cars to slow to a crawl when they meet head-on, veer into the shoulders of thick brambles and then smile gamely if everyone survives. You almost certainly won’t actually die, but seriously, don’t drive this road in the dark.
Your grateful heart leaps when you see a small brown sign in the weeds sporting an arrow and the silhouette of a golfer. It’s a stunning blue sky day in September, light winds and 67 degrees, none of the frigid Siberian gales winter can bring. Within minutes you spot some tightly mown grass and another sign: “Please sound horn to warn players.” The charming entrance to Cruit Island (“critch” in the Gaelic) shares the No. 1 fairway. “We get a few cracked windshields,” you are told. It was a tight squeeze to find nine holes among these 86 acres of sheer Thorr granite outcroppings formed some 420 million years ago and exposed maybe a mere 17,000 years ago during the last ice age, when everyone routinely three-putted. Hardly an Irish secret any longer, the Cruit guest book in the cozy one-room clubhouse-bar-pro shop now boasts unanimous raves from Seoul, Oklahoma City, Naples, Des Moines or Perth.
As a dozen guys who probably change their own oil gather for beers by the clubhouse’s large plate glass window, long-time member Paddy Sweeney, a former civil attorney in nearby Dungloe, sits me down over a Guinness to spin the Cruit origin story, which, by law, must involve a Catholic priest.
“It was January or February, 1982,” began Sweeney, in a much-abbreviated version of the tale, “and a bunch of us from here had just finished driving the lousy 25 kilometer road to play at Narin & Portnoo Links and we talked about building something here. I was delegated to talk to Bishop Seamus Hegarty about these 86 acres controlled by the diocese and we eventually got a 99-year lease. We employed Tony Boyle Sr. (a local businessman who died in 2022 at 86) and got a youth employment grant over two summers, with everyone pitching in with shovels, moving sod, old lawnmowers, women on their hands and knees picking weeds and making sure to leave the bentgrass. Twenty men came with weed eaters. One 1950s tractor. No large machinery whatsoever. We had a tiny budget. It’s amazing to think we got it done. You could never do it today.” The club opened in 1986.
Michael Doherty, a golf pro from City of Derry Golf Club, about 90 minutes away, did much of the routing, with guidance from Boyle and an influential former club president, Columba Bonner, among others. Like Carne Golf Links in County Mayo, Cruit was a community cooperative enterprise, neither a municipal public course nor an American-style country club. A dozen or so founders each put in about 100 Irish pounds (about $400 today) and a beloved Irish crooner and TV host from Donegal, Danny O’Donnell, raised thousands more with a concert. (A lifetime member, he has toured the world and still draws a crowd at Cruit when he’s spotted on the course. In the 1980s, local women used to wait in line for hours to get his autograph.) As close as a big family, each year the club hosts a mass for their deceased members, and more progressive than many, Cruit has always had active women members and is believed to have had the first woman club president in Ireland, Eileen Oglesby, elected in 1994.
“She was just the logical choice,” offered Cruit competition secretary Eugene McGarvey, as we fired our first salvos off the number one tee box. Even injured, the local Kincasslagh man possessed a rhythmic swing and crisp short game that seemed almost instinctive, maybe inherited. Like many here, McGarvey is thrilled but somewhat bemused at the growing international attention Cruit has received in the golf press. You see, Cruit has been great for a few decades now, but it easily flew under the radar of visitors determined only to play the likes of Ballybunion, Lahinch and County Down, and the driving distance to Outer Donegal – “You can see Newfoundland from here,” they joke – discouraged the faint hearted. Oh, and there will always be the 9-hole stigma that still afflicts some golfers.
“Cruit used to be just a novelty,” McGarvey said. “I really didn’t like the way they used the word `fun’ when they talked about us.” But the golf cognoscenti’s insatiable urge to find the newest, remotest, most unspoiled playground, combined with the emergence of Donegal as its own distinct golf destination (with Rosapenna, Ballyliffen, Murvagh, Portsalon, North West, Narin & Portnoo) finally tipped the scales for the world’s traveling hackers. Still, some habits have been hard to change. At Cruit, Americans, while forever welcomed, have developed a reputation for keeping to themselves mostly and just hopping back on the tour bus when their round is over, rather than staying nearby to sample the good restaurants, vibrant pubs and magnificent Atlantic coast. “But we still love them,” assures McGarvey.
Those who do make the journey are inevitably charmed by the almost living room-like clubhouse, where the same friendly young person is likely to draw your Guinness, sell you a Cruit cap and take your green fee. On that fall afternoon, tables of short-sleeved men with curly hair and pink sun-kissed faces were laughing and debating their Stableford points and Gaelic football. “It wouldn’t be this way if we had a TV here, like most bars,” said McGarvey. “TV kills conversation.” The dressing rooms are spartan, but all a golfer actually needs. “We wouldn’t really tolerate a K Club style of a visitors’ dressing room,” he said, invoking Ireland’s comically ostentatious parkland course (my words, not his) west of Dublin that hosted the 2006 Ryder Cup. The antithesis of such excess, Cruit remains first a community golf course, where there’s an honesty box for depositing green fees when the clubhouse is closed, and you’re welcome to play in jeans, if so inclined.
Like most Irish courses, Cruit Island has no driving range, so you’d better warm up in the car because the 430-yard first hole is the number one stroke index. Playing five tees twice at the same distance going out, and four at varying lengths on the return, Cruit plays about 5600 yards for 18 holes (scorecards and signs are in meters), at a par of 68, with no par fives and only two par fours over 400 yards, yet you’ll never think you’re playing some Boca Raton executive course. There is an assortment of blind shots, canted fairways, tricky nuanced greens, wild rough and deceptive approach shots over exposed cliffs which, in normal 15-20 mph wind, gives Cruit all the challenge most golfers want.
Skipping about, we must first gaze upon the lusciously photogenic par 3 sixth because she is the homecoming queen. Hardly imposing at 137 yards on the first nine and 145 on the back nine upper tees, the famous sixth demands that you stand on a tee box set into a narrow strip of land jutting into the Atlantic, eye the quilt of green target, block out the chasm of frothing ocean beneath you and calmly hit anything from a gap wedge to a 3-wood as the freckle-ripping wind toys with your courage. A tip: shots left short, long or right send you to an untimely death. This is such a memorable spot in all of Irish golf that if there’s nobody behind you, I’m sure McGarvey won’t mind if you hit a dozen balls over the jagged abyss, where, a few years ago, a whale got stuck for several days, resisting a huge local rescue effort by boats and fishermen, and then somehow overnight was thankfully extricated by the high tide. Imagine, somebody somewhere is calling Cruit just a 9-holer.
On any normal day with a prevailing west-southwest wind, you might often need a full-throated driver into a blind but ample Cruit fairway. Beg to play with a member and you might save yourself money and six strokes. The bunkers are crusty blasted affairs with tufts of marram that fit perfectly on this amazing golf canvass. What very little earthmoving occurred here can be appreciated on the gorgeous number three – behold the Atlantic! — where the top of a hill was whacked to create what Sweeney calls “a smoother driving path.”
But you won’t remember much of this because you’ll be too busy reaching for your camera. Arrive early and just get comfortable with scenery that rivals Pebble Beach in three directions. Get some photos done early, maybe walk on the rocky beach, and you’ll feel less guilty about concentrating on your score. Then consider that at 60 euros (hunt for discounts) you could play Cruit Island three or four times for what you’ll pay at some of Ireland’s more, um, prestigious courses.
As for the course’s length, McGarvey says it can’t be stretched because it borders a conservation area, “but when visitors leave here they never tell us, you should make it longer, they tell us how exciting it is to play here and that they can’t wait to return. That makes us happy.”
A former Sports Illustrated investigative reporter and native Texan, Bruce Selcraig has played golf in Ireland for 27 years, but still wishes they had real Mexican food. Selcraig@swbell.net