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.

Set beneath the Mourne Mountains along the shores of Dundrum Bay in Northern Ireland, Royal County Down is a links course that feels utterly timeless.