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.

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 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.