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.

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.

There is a big difference between a course that is a one-and-done experience and a course that will transform how you think about the game. The Bluffs Grand Ho Tram is the latter.

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.