In a recent scientific study of six bemused San Antonio golfers contemplating their postgame muny brews, I asked the simple question, “Where is Belfast?”
One ventured, “Somewhere in Europe,” and five others mumbled in earnest.
Perhaps the response would have been more enlightened at, say, The Yale Golf Course, but sadly, even after the wildly successful 2019 Open Championship at Royal Portrush, just an hour north of Belfast, many American golfers remain, um, challenged about the concept of Northern Ireland.
“It is connected to the larger Republic of Ireland, but an entirely separate country,” I offered, needing a globe. “It’s slightly smaller than Connecticut, yet has two consensus, world top ten golf courses — Royal Portrush and Royal County Down.”
“I’ve heard of them,” said a mumbler. “They sound cold.”
“Does it rain there?” asked a Rhodes Scholar.
“Only at night,” I promised.
All the sudden, I felt a dollop of empathy for the Northern Ireland tourism industry. Try as they might, the stereotypical American golfer brain is hard to figure. They might happily spend $4,000 on a Florida family vacation, but spending the same or less on an Irish golf trip brings forlorn grimacing about bucket trips not taken.
A study commissioned by the Royal & Ancient Golf Club, which runs the Open, found that Americans made up about 11 percent of all the foreign visitors during the 2019 Open, but will there be a long-term sustainable golf tourism bump from Yanks visiting Northern Ireland?
John McLaughlin, CEO of North & West Coast Links Golf Ireland, told me recently that his tourism business increased some 50 percent between 2019 and 2023, thanks in large part to the Portrush Open but also some three decades of marketing to the American golf audience through such things as magazine ads and running booths at the annual PGA Golf Show in Orlando.
“The day that a golf trip to Northern Ireland or the Northwest region of the Republic of Ireland is something an American would only do on their third or fourth trip to Ireland has passed,” said McLaughlin. “We are now a first choice destination.”
McLaughlin said the return of the Open Championship to Royal Portrush in 2025 is already generating intense American interest among his travelers, both rookies and veterans. But with literally dozens of great courses to choose from that are hardly household names among most American golfers, where exactly should you go?
Golf itineraries are such tricky things. Do you really want to play 36 holes a day just because there’s enough summer sun to accomplish this? (Guess our answer.) Do you have to pay over $200 a round to find world class golf? (Absolutely not, but Irish golf inflation is a thorny issue.) Do you want to drive yourself, on the left side of the road, and be more independent and spontaneous or go with a group, not worry much about logistics, and hire one of Ireland’s uniformly brilliant bus drivers? (Seriously, as a group, they are the Swiss Army Knives of tourism.)
Let’s just deal with where to play.
First, fly to Dublin, which is about a four-hour drive to the northwest Atlantic Coast. (There’s great golf around Dublin, but we’ll save that for another day.) Shannon Airport, in southwest Ireland near Limerick, is far less crowded than Dublin but not necessarily closer to the courses discussed here, and the U.S. flights are more limited. Set a price alert from one of those online airline ticket monitors that might spot a magical discount, but prepare for something around $1200. You’ll save significantly by booking months in advance and leaving from a non-stop U.S. hub, such as Atlanta, Dallas or Chicago.
Excuse the salespitchy tone, but with so many quality courses in this part of the Emerald Isle, it’s difficult to find mediocre golf. I’ll offer two logical itineraries – one in Northern Ireland, the other not — but any number of the nearby golf options offered will be just as memorable, and maybe, less full of Dallas doctors and Boston bankers.
First, in the northwest of the Republic of Ireland lies golf-rich County Donegal. A great week of golf would start at Rosapenna Hotel & Golf Resort in the wee village of Downings, on the shores of Sheephaven Bay. Jettison that American image of a sprawling golf resort with faux corporate hospitality and instead picture genuine, low-key local courtesy focused on 54 holes of marvelous golf and one of the best restaurants in the region.
The new jewel at Rosapenna is Tom Doak’s thrilling St. Patrick’s Links – his first design in Ireland — which, after opening in 2021, rocketed to #49 recently in Golf Digest’s non-U.S. world rankings.
With oceanic swales, gnarly blasted bunkers and a Montana-sized layout, St. Patrick’s vaulted in GOLF magazine’s rankings almost before the parking lot was striped, past famous Baltusrol, Royal Troon, Prestwick, Winged Foot and Nova Scotia’s Cabot Links. Only impregnable tradition and a history of famous tournament champions can keep St. Patrick’s from joining the likes of Ballybunion, Lahinch, County Down and Portrush as the finest courses on the island.
“My clients care more about rankings than I do,” Doak told me last year, “but I knew how well we had done” when several close friends said St. Patrick’s might be his finest work. (As some gauge of how Doak feels about the project, he took a minority equity share rather than his customary fee of a million dollars or more.) Somehow, on an enormous canvass of marram-cloaked dunes, Doak not only gave the visitor pristine vistas where you take in the ocean, sky and a horizon of neighboring holes, as though you were indeed the king of golf, but also carved out intimate greens complexes that feel like a private amphitheater. This audacious 300-acre playground is the new mind-altering destination in Irish golf, and resort guests can play it for 210 euros.
But before Doak ever turned a spade, Rosapenna had two existing courses that beckoned the masses. The Pat Ruddy-designed Sandy Hills Links (1992) has always been regarded as a demanding giant of a course (7183 yards from the tips) shaped from lands that were once trekked by the pioneering architects of the game – Old Tom Morris, Harry Vardon, James Braid and Harry Colt.
Ruddy, who also designed The European Club, south of Dublin, among other great Irish courses, was eons ago a mere humble golf writer. He’s now an Irish golf baron of sorts, and remains an indefatigable friend of the game, apple tarts and traveling Yanks. Not one to obfuscate about “retail golf” design, Ruddy wrote of his snug Sandy Hills fairways: “Care was taken not to get swept away by thinking that massively wide fairways have a mysterious strategy to them other than getting more people around in a hurry…I hate that term `retail golf” as it tends to reduce the golf course to a general store in spirit and the golfer to a customer rather than honoring him as a fellow sportsman and hunter of birdies.”
The Old Tom Morris Links has an ancestry dating back to the turn of the century, where high tea on the veranda of the Rosapenna Hotel was quite the thing and the parking lot was filled with Rolls Royces and Bentleys. (An historical aside. The skull-crushing assassination of the brutish, tenant-evicting third Lord Leitrim in 1878 allowed his successor and golfer, the Fourth Lord Leitrim, to invite Old Tom Morris to Rosapenna in 1891, thus ushering in world class golf to Donegal.) The new Strand Nine (opened 2009) and Valley Nine combine to make a mighty 7,000-yard work of subtle golf artistry. You’d be delighted to play here even if St. Patrick’s had never arisen. In 2024, the resort has offered a three-course meal ticket that allows you to play St. Patrick’s, Sandy Hills and Old Tom for $495. Next year, it goes to $550.
For the rest of your Donegal week, head about 90 minutes east of Rosapenna along the wondrous Lough Swilly, almost as far north as Ireland reaches, at the tip of the Wild Atlantic Way, and you’ll find the Ballyliffin Golf Club, and perhaps its manager of the past 20 years, John Farren.
A hometown boy from Carndonagh, five miles away, Farren presides over his rolling links manor like few others, paying as much attention to the grill’s Glashedy Burger, nuisance black crows digging out divots and his stunning par 3 course, the Pollan Links, as he gives his starlets, the Glashedy Links, designed by Pat Ruddy and Tom Craddock (1995), and The Old Links (1973), fashioned by Eddie Hackett, with various improvements by Ruddy, Nick Faldo and others. (Though Faldo lent his name, his meticulous architect, Guy Hockley, deserves much credit.)
In Irish golf terms, Ballyliffin is just a teenager, founded in 1947, but of late its impressive two courses have hosted a parade of important tournaments, including the 2018 Irish Open, the 2016 Irish Close Championship, the Ladies Irish Open, the Irish Seniors Open and the RANDA Home Internationals, among many others. (Glashedy costs 260 euros; Old Links 240; Pollan par 3, 20).
But the Ballyliffin Golf Club has become more significant than its tournament pedigree. It understandably seems to dominate life for many in the surrounding towns. While tourists will be enjoying the bike tours, castles, bog “safaris” and the McGonagle family’s Wild Alpaca Way, a beautiful two-hour hike with the animals, clearly much of the Inishowen Peninsula is working on its short game. Ballyliffin’s practice area and par 3 course (90 to 150 yards; opened 2020) are not only maintained at high quality, but they’ve become somewhat of a date night option on the weekends. I actually saw happy teenagers and couples there playing golf.
“Pat Ruddy designed the par 3 course personally,” Farren said as he drove us around in a Ford pickup. “He was in the excavator moving the soil. It’s been great for the kids and also the older members.” By necessity, Farren is constantly tweaking his product. He noticed that more golfers, especially Swedes, were ordering non-alcoholic Guinness, heresy to some but a sign to Farren that as his golf visitors were getting more fit, perhaps the restaurant menu should reflect that.
The town of Ballyliffin has just 600 residents and no pub – you’ll need to walk 1.3 miles to Clonmany – but slightly larger villages are close by, including Culdaff’s McGrory Hotel (16 minutes from the golf course), where good music and a pear tart can be had.
There’s your week in Donegal, but if you have more time, exceptional options await: Cruit Island, fast becoming the most renowned nine-hole course in Ireland; Narin-Portnoo Links, still glistening from a deep refurbishment by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner; Donegal Golf Club (known locally as Murvagh), where substantial work by Pat Ruddy has enhanced a fine 1973 creation by the esteemed Irish architect, Eddie Hackett; and Portsalon Golf Club, where the beach is so seductive you’ll not hear anyone shouting, “Fore !!!”
But on we go, gliding into a second week of golf, a second dreamy itinerary in, yes, an entirely different country. But first, a short digression.
There are no border checkpoints any longer when you leave the Republic and enter Northern Ireland, but the road signs are distinctly different, the road quality often improves and the careful eye may notice that in some towns you’ll see on display the English Union Jack or the orange flag of the Northern Ireland Protestant fraternal organization, the Orange Order, not unlike a Rebel flag you might see in America’s Deep South.
Not to be alarmed, the sectarian violence between Catholics and Protestants that claimed some 3,500 lives between the late 1960s and roughly 1998 – known over here as “the Troubles” — is all but completely extinguished, at least in public. But it will linger in some living rooms for generations. Tourists hardly need to worry about this, but understanding it will make you seem less like, um, Elmer Fudd. There is some practical advice about pub attire that might come in handy: Do not wear your Boston Celtics or Texas Rangers jerseys into unknown bars. In the soccer world, the green Celtic colors and the Rangers name are associated with two Glasgow, Scotland teams that were heavily supported by Catholics (Celtic) and Protestants (Rangers), so their colors carry a message. The teams have played each other some 441 times going back to the Pleistocene Era and alcohol-fueled rivalry still stokes the religious/nationalistic hatred in some nooks. Most folks have grown beyond all that. Some have not. Simple awareness of the past is always useful.
Golf anyone?
If you’re headed to Northern Ireland and you love golf, chances are that you are already laser focused on Royal County Down and Royal Portrush, two perennial fixtures on almost everyone’s list of the top 10 golf courses on the planet. They are astounding, soaked in rich history and perhaps worth their steep price tags – County Down, 425 English pounds; Portrush 340. But because they are so popular and booked months in advance, and so aptly covered in thousands of golf articles, we are sidestepping them with a Tim Hardaway crossover, so we can focus on a few Northern Ireland tracks that Americans often miss.
Just 30 minutes from Royal County Down, Ardglass Golf Club hardly sneaks up on anyone like it did 20 years ago, when tour buses full of Yanks were as rare as windless days. But word has gotten out that in a land full of scenic golf, few can rival Ardglass’s opening four cliffside holes, all dominated by the Irish Sea on the left and its jagged black coastline. The ocean is visible on every hole and comes into play on eight of them. A splendid idea, before you ever reach the 15th century clubhouse guarded by a row of cannons, is to go to the course website and watch an extraordinary drone flyover video of all 18 holes. Every course should have one. Who needs golf writers?
If you’re worried that a course measuring just 6,268 yards won’t quite test your mettle, concern ye not. The opening four holes dance upon high cliffs above the sea and feature enough stone walls and embankments to instill a siege mentality within the rookie golfer. The first hole alone, just 327 yards but requiring a mighty drive uphill over the rocks, has shaken many a smooth sunbelt swing.
Does it seem windy to you? The ocean is everywhere, but smooth greens, strategic cruel bunkers and deceptive approach shots all conspire with the gales to make Ardglass much tougher than it seems on a scorecard.
Founded in 1896, Ardglass (160 pounds) has only been a full 18-hole course since 1970 and suffered from a “dull back nine” label until 2003, when former Northern Ireland tour pro David Jones added three holes (9, 10 and 11) at the far end of the course, hugging the sea, that quickened the golf soul. The renovation may have sacrificed some charming old holes, like a par 5 that required a quirky second shot over an ancient six-foot stone fence, but most regulars seem to think the changes were for the good. Hole 12 might even remind you of Pebble Beach’s famed 7th and I’ll happily nominate the opening four holes as among the most dramatic in golf. Architect Ken Kearney continued the improvements in 2015, especially with the bunkering, but thankfully they did nothing to the fabulous castle clubhouse, which just may be the oldest in the golf world.
I checked my notebook from my first visit to Ardglass, in 2006, and enjoyed remembering these lockerroom bulletin board advisories: “From the 9th June, 2004, it is forbidden to hit golf balls into the sea,” and my favorite, “Juniors, if you feel you have been badly treated by an adult on the course, do not under any circumstance give lip…report the incident…no shouting or horseplay…and definitely no back cheek to adults.”
And then scribbled as a sidenote, with no elaboration: “A member at Portrush tells me that a 16 year-old named Rory McIlroy shot a 61 there on July 12 (2006) to set the course record.” Rory was already a famous teenage star by then in Europe, but I had to ask the proper spelling of his last name. I later interviewed him in the lobby of Belfast’s Hotel Europa – he wore an oversized gray hoodie, and his dad drove him to the hotel — and in my notes I wrote the words, “amazing poise.”
Sixty miles northwest of Belfast’s city hall, along the ocean and almost in sight of Scotland, lies Castlerock Golf Club, where its history is naturally full of bishops and earls and an original Scottish designer, Ben Sayers, who, at 5-foot-3 and a trained acrobat, played in every British Open between 1880 and 1923 and was famous for doing cartwheels on the greens when he made an important putt.
My son and I played Castlerock in four hours of mist and gray skies, so we were robbed of some links grandeur — no cartwheels needed – but the exacting challenge of the links was on full display. (Truth be told, not all the course is true links.) The longest holes always seemed upwind, demanding precision irons to greens guarded by lofty dunes and tangled dense rough. I was chipping for pars and settling for bogeys all day long.
One hole lingers in my mind, the 9th, an exceptionally difficult par 3 over 200 yards of impenetrable gorse and rock. The back nine seemed cut from the same cloth, with some invitingly generous fairways leading to intriguing greens, and the quirky finishing hole, featuring a dogleg around an enormous mound to a sharply elevated green, a glimpse of the course’s character from the original 1901 layout. Quirky works well over here, usually some architectural workaround over ancestral obstacles that calls for a shot you could never imagine, much less practice. (I see you, North Berwick.)
And now for something heretical. You’ve come all this way and braved the sometimes-wintery summer to only play the magisterial links. But just to break up the scenery and maybe spare you a day of howling wind, we’re offering a pair of Ireland’s finest inland or parkland courses.
On that 2006 trip, when I first saw Belfast’s Malone Golf Club, I thought I had been transplanted to upstate New York or Pennsylvania, with gently rolling hills of hardwoods, conifers and an idyllic 27-acre glacial lake full of brown and rainbow trout that comes into play on four back-nine holes. The ocean seemed miles away.
The indispensable Irish golf bible, Links of Heaven (Richard Phinney and Scott Whitley), helpfully explains that in 1919, the famed Alister Mackenzie, architect of Augusta National, Cypress Point and Ireland’s Lahinch, was paid the hefty sum of 300 pounds to lay out a new golf course on what was already Malone’s third home in Belfast. (The current track is at the fourth site.) But Mackenzie’s work crews had barely finished before Malone’s upper class members rebelled and demanded a refund. They settled for two-thirds of the fee. By 1931, the apparently good-enough Mackenzie design had attracted 850 members and Malone was reported to be among the 12 largest golf clubs in the world. (Seriously, buy the book.)
The Malone you see today – actually a 27-hole complex — is largely the work of John Harris and Fred Hawtree, and is quite engaging. (Its well-heeled Protestant legacy attracted civil rights protests during the Troubles, resulting in the bombing of the clubhouse in February, 1972.) Some have argued that several tee shots aren’t challenging enough or that the lake should be a more prominent fixture, but those thoughts hardly ruffled my afternoon. Malone will cost visitors 125 pounds to play.
Just five miles from Malone, in a South Belfast forest sharing the name, Belvoir Park Golf Club is a renowned Harry Colt creation from 1927 – he also did Royal Portrush — that feels like an oasis of calm in the churning urban grip of the city. Rather than detail the nooks and hollows of each hole, none of which you will remember as you enjoy Belvoir (say Beaver), suffice to say that there’s a coherence and comforting rhythm to Colt’s work that makes golfers feel they are in the hands of a skilled pilot.
The short 8th is a nice example of the H.S. Colt touch. The novice will see an ample green from the tee with nothing too worrisome. The serial golf victim will see an effective landing area maybe one half of what the casual eye sees, reduced by rounded edges that look like the hoods of a VW Beetle, vacuuming balls into the adjoining bunkers, swales and hollows.
Concerns about an overly difficult green here or there, however, are far outweighed by, for example, the terrific dogleg par 4s at twelve and thirteen, and yet another great par 4 at the penultimate hole. A renovation around 2020 by England-based Swan Golf Designs added some new tees and bunkering to some holes that were thought not mean enough.
It’s unfair to leave out so many good golf courses in Northern Ireland. If you need others to fill out your week, try Portstewart (1894), Royal Belfast (1881), Ballycastle (1890), Clandeboye (1933, Dufferin) and impress your friends by telling them you played the Portrush sister course, the Valley Links (140 pounds), which is beloved by sages such as designer Tom Doak and which would be a destination were it not next to where they will be playing the 2025 British Open.
And, finally, the best reason for a Northern Ireland trip is Belfast. The once dreary and dangerous capital city of 345,000 has evolved into a tech-savvy business center that promotes art, film, music, literature and the environment. You’ll will get local recommendations for pubs and tours out the wazoo, but here are two just to get you started:
If you have any interest in knowing more about The Troubles, the British occupation of Ireland, the Irish Republican Army and the 30 years of car bombings and retaliation from which this fine city has risen, simply ask at your hotel for a reliable “black taxi” or walking tour of the Troubles and you’ll likely get one of the most balanced and enlightening historical tours in all the world, occasionally from a professor, poet or even a former political activist.
And while you can find a dozen quality pubs with foot-stomping traditional Irish music, try The Garrick, near city hall, and the sublime Madden’s (74 Smithfield; 11:30 am to 1 am; cash, no credit), which can get nose-to-chin with jamming locals or touring national acts. American author Rus Bradburd often plays the fiddle there and gave me a few more Belfast highlights: The Botanic Gardens, No Alibis Bookstore (great mystery section), Mournes Seafood and Deanes Seafood (near city hall, which has an excellent free tour), the Queens University Film Center, Milltown Cemetery, and this advice for tourists, forget the rental car and use an often cheaper and quicker taxi.
Now rest up for your tee time.
Bruce Selcraig is a former investigative reporter for Sports Illustrated and has written for The New York Times, The Atlantic and Smithsonian, among others. selcraig@swbell.net