TeeOffAdventures

Jameson Links The first time I played this course, in 2022, I hated it. I want to be honest about why, because the reason turned out to have very little to do with the golf course. We played Portmarnock that morning. One of the great championship links in the world, immediately next door, and we walked off it and came straight here for the afternoon round. Nothing was ever going to survive that comparison. I stood on the first tee of Jameson Links with Portmarnock still in my

You are on top of a hill and there is nothing between you and the weather. No shelter, no framing, no corridor of trees or dunes to hit down. The ground falls away in every direction, the wind has nothing to break it, and every shot is played against a horizon rather than into a gap. It reminded me immediately of the Costa Navarino courses, and specifically of that — the exposure of being up high with the world laid out underneath you. Very few Irish courses feel like it.

Enniscrone is overrated. I thought so the first time I played it, in 2022, and I did not entirely trust myself, an unfamiliar course and a middling round can turn anybody into a critic. So when we built this September's trip I put it back on the schedule specifically to find out whether I had been unfair.

There is a mountain standing over this golf course called Knocknarea, and the lump on top of it is a neolithic cairn that is traditionally held to be the grave of Queen Maeve. Nobody has ever excavated it. It has sat up there for something like five thousand years, and you spend your round underneath it.

I have played golf in wind before. I had never played a course where somebody had gone out before us and strapped the flags to the pins so they would not blow away. That decided the day. The greens played slow — not badly kept, but nothing was going to run true into that. We were aiming thirty metres off line on approach shots and hoping. Putts that should have been quick were being knocked at. By the fourth hole nobody in the group was talking about their score any more

In 1993, a month into the construction of the Glashedy Links next door, a helicopter landed at Ballyliffin. Nick Faldo got out, played the Old Links, and called it the most natural links he had ever seen. He liked it enough that he stayed the night to finish all eighteen holes. Three years later, after Glashedy opened, he made an offer to buy the club outright. The members voted it down.

The club was founded at a meeting in Ballyliffin Hall in April 1947, and for years the members cut the course themselves, bringing their own lawnmowers, mowing, then playing. They still call it the Spirit of Ballyliffin, and they are refreshingly unembarrassed about having got where they are with no money at all.

Ardglass is a dramatic cliff top course in the shadow of Royal County Down

Kungsbanan in Aland Golf Club is totallt different from the sister course in the same club