Ireland

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

The morning we played Waterville started with rain blowing horizontally past the hotel window before sunrise. One of the guys in our group came down to breakfast in flipflops because he had decided, looking at the weather, that golf was off and he might as well be comfortable. There were eight of us. We told him fine, stay at the hotel, we'll pick you up after the round.

The famous Arnold Palmer quote about Tralee, the one every review uses, is that he may have designed the front nine but God designed the back nine. It's a great line and Palmer was good at great lines, but I think it does the front nine a disservice. The back nine at Tralee is genuinely spectacular and deserves the praise it gets. The front nine is also very good and people don't talk about it enough because they've been told for forty years that it's the lesser half.

Most reviews of Old Head start by trying to describe the setting and immediately reaching for the same comparisons. Pebble Beach on steroids. The Cliffs of Moher with golf on top. A video game come to life. I've read all of these phrases multiple times and they all undersell what the place actually is. Old Head is a 220-acre piece of land that sticks two miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, hooked to the south coast of Ireland by a narrow road barely wide enough for two cars to

Before we had even hit a ball, everyone in our group was handed an engraved metal bag tag with their name on it. Small thing. But it told me straight away what kind of place Adare Manor is: somebody here thinks about every detail, and nobody is in a hurry. Most top courses now try to stand out on design and conditioning alone. Adare does those too, but the bag tag is the sort of extra a venue with the 2027 Ryder Cup coming is expected to have, and they have it. The drive in d

St Patrick's Links is the newest of Rosapenna's three courses: a Tom Doak design through huge Donegal dunes that feels ancient and brand new at the same time.

Sandy Hills is Rosapenna's big, bold course: giant dunes, huge elevation changes and relentless Atlantic wind on the edge of Sheephaven Bay.

Old Tom Morris Links is the oldest of Rosapenna's three courses and pure fun to play: firm turf, ever-changing wind and links golf the way it used to be.

The Dunluce Links at Royal Portrush doesn't reveal its full power at first glance. It is a raw, demanding links on the north coast of Northern Ireland.

Set beneath the Mourne Mountains on the shores of Dundrum Bay, Royal County Down is a links that feels utterly timeless, and I got lucky with the weather.