Ardglass. In The Shadow Of Royal County Down

Gunnar Kobin

8 hours ago

5 min read

By the fourth hole I could not see properly out of either eye.

That is not a metaphor about the golf. I wear glasses, and the salt spray coming off the Irish Sea at Ardglass had coated both lenses in a film that a towel would not shift — it just moved the salt around and made it worse. I spent the rest of the round playing to a soft-focus impression of where the flag probably was. Somebody in our group suggested I take them off. I tried that on the 6th and discovered I could see even less. So: if you wear glasses, bring a proper lens cloth. Bring two. I have played plenty of golf in sea wind and never had it do that so relentlessly

We had driven down from Newcastle hotel into weather that had already made its mind up. The flags on the harbour were horizontal when we parked. The sea below the first tee had stopped looking like water and started looking like weather. Nobody suggested we skip it, because that is not a conversation golfers have on the first day of a trip.

The other thing you notice in the car park is that the clubhouse is a castle. Not a converted manor pretending to be one — an actual fortified building with towers and loop-holes cut into the stone, sitting between you and the sea. It was begun no later than 1405 as a row of fortified warehouses on the harbour, built so the merchants could defend their ware-rooms against pirates, and converted into a castellated house in the late 1700s. The golf club came much later. It was founded in 1896 by a clergyman on seven holes of under a thousand yards, and only moved into the castle in 1911. They call it the oldest clubhouse in the world. Other clubs dispute the title. Nobody disputes the date on the building. The restaurant is called 1405 and the practice net is inside the castle walls.

The golf course took a lot longer to arrive than the building did. Ardglass played as nine holes for most of its life and only reached eighteen around 1970, when land became available and David Jones laid out the full course. It has been worked on steadily since 2015 by the Irish architect Ken Kearney, whose long renovation has brought revetted bunkering across the property and substantial changes at the 10th, 16th and 17th. That is worth knowing before you look at a guidebook, incidentally — most of them still print par 70 and 6,268 yards, while the club's current card says par 71 and 6,299.

The first five holes run along the cliffs and they are the entire reason to come here.

This is not dune links. No sand, no marram, no soft ground — it is rocky headland, black jagged rock directly below you with the Irish Sea working on it. If you have played Old Head you will recognise the feeling inside two minutes, and you are paying a small fraction of what Old Head charges. The club says the sea is visible from every hole and in play on eight of them, which sounds like the sort of thing a club says until you walk it. Even the holes that turn inland keep the water in the frame. That matters more than it sounds. Plenty of coastal courses give you four holes on the water and fourteen in a field, and then sell you the four.

The 2nd is the photograph — a short par 3 fired across a rocky inlet from a bench cut into the cliff. In the wind we had it was a different golf hole depending on which way the gust was going at the moment you pulled the trigger. Somebody hit a full six iron. Somebody else, ten minutes later, hit a wedge. Caddie told us that some weeks ago one club member fell into the inlet and they had to bring a chopper to lift him out of there directly to the hospital.

The 12th is the other one everybody knows, downhill to a green that looks entirely surrounded by sea, with the Mourne Mountains and a lighthouse behind it. The club's own description calls it Ireland's answer to the 7th at Pebble Beach, on steroids, and standing there I was not going to argue with them.

Given the conditions, the greens held up remarkably well. They rolled true and they stopped the ball quickly, which is more than a links green taking that kind of punishment owes anybody. They are also small, and that is the whole defence of the place. Nothing on the card frightens you — par 71, around 6,300 yards, no long carries — but you have to land the ball on a surface the size of a back garden while the wind decides where it actually goes. Miss, and the ground around these greens is not kind.

Now the 15th. There is a ditch behind that green. In front of the ditch there is a wooden plank, and from the fairway your eye reads that plank as a backstop — something to stop a long approach and keep it on the putting surface. It is not a backstop. It sits in front of the trouble, not behind it. Anything strong goes over the top and you will not see where it went. The club's own hole description does mention water less than twenty-five feet behind the green, so the information exists if you go looking for it before you play. Nobody looks for it before they play.

Where Ardglass lets you down is the finish. Some holes in the second half turn inland, the fairways widen out, and the drama simply drains off. The golf is perfectly fine. It just is not the golf you drove down for, and after that opening it feels like a long walk back to the castle. This is not only me being difficult — most write-ups of Ardglass say a version of the same thing, that the waterfront holes are exceptional and a fair amount of what sits between and after is ordinary farmland. Know it in advance and it will not spoil anything.

The clubhouse afterwards was exactly what you want after four hours of that. Hot food, a bar, staff who could see what the weather had done to us.

Play it. I would put it high on any Northern Ireland itinerary that already has Royal County Down on it, which is forty minutes up the road and is the main reason more people have not heard of this place. Ardglass is not in that class and is not pretending to be. What it has is five holes at the start that you will still be describing next year, and a clubhouse older than almost every golf club on earth.

Pick a calmer day than we got, if you can. But do not wait for one — half of why those first five holes feel the way they do is the wind trying to take your hat off the cliff.