Ballyliffin Glashedy: The Man Who Carried for Lottie Woad

Gunnar Kobin

1 day ago

4 min read

Our caddie mentioned it somewhere around the third hole on Ballyliffin Glashedy, in the offhand way caddies mention things, and I filed it under the usual category. He had been on the bag when Lottie Woad won the Irish Open.

It is true. His name is Gary Foley, he is a member and caddie here, and he carried for her at Carton House in July 2025 when she won the KPMG Women's Irish Open by six shots at 21 under par. She was still an amateur and world number one amateur at the time, so she could not take the money — the €67,500 went to Madelene Sagström in second place. He came back to Donegal afterwards and went back to caddying at his own club, which tells you something about Ballyliffin and possibly about him.

What made him worth the money was not the story. It was that his reads were right and his advice was actually advice. He told us where to miss, which is the thing you are genuinely paying for, and on a course this exposed that is worth several shots to anybody. He was not a man reciting the number off the sprinkler head and then standing back to watch.

We had the place to ourselves, which was the other surprise of the morning. Not quiet — empty. No group on the first tee ahead of us, nobody behind, nothing moving out on the course. This is a venue that has hosted an Irish Open and an Amateur Championship, and on a Monday in September we could have been the only people on it.

That is the deal at Ballyliffin. It is a long way north — the Inishowen peninsula, the most northerly club in Ireland — and the drive is the price of admission. What you get for paying it is championship golf you can very often have to yourself.

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.

Glashedy is where that changed. A development committee formed in 1991 and went after two Irish architects rather than an international name — Pat Ruddy, who built The European Club down in Wicklow, and the amateur-turned-designer Tom Craddock, who had worked with him at Druids Glen. Ground was broken in May 1993 and the course opened in August 1995. Ruddy has since gone back through the bunkering and given it the high sod-wall faces you play now. It takes its name from Glashedy Rock, the sea stack offshore that stays in your eyeline for most of the round.

The greens were the best I putted all week. Fast, but fair with it, and the pace was consistent from the first green to the last — so when a putt missed, it missed because I had read it wrong rather than because the surface had opinions. That combination is rarer than it should be. Plenty of clubs run their greens quick to impress visitors and end up with something that punishes a good stroke.

The par 3s are the photographs. The 7th plays from the top of a dune to a green sixty or seventy feet below with a marsh pond guarding the front right, and when our group walked onto that tee the conversation stopped for a second. The 5th has water behind it and out of bounds hard right, which is an unpleasant pairing in any breeze. Of the longer holes the par-5 13th is the one I talked about afterwards — uphill along a fairway sunk between dunes, three real shots to get home.

But what actually stays with me about Glashedy is harder to photograph than any of that.

There is no weak stretch. No hole built purely to move you from one corner of the property to another, no point in the round where you think, here we go, this is the one they had to put in. It flows. And at the end you cannot name the bad hole, because there is not one.

That is far harder to build than three signature holes and far less interesting to write about, which is roughly why a course with this record still feels underexposed. It does not shout at you.

The 18th deserves its own paragraph, because it decided the 2018 Irish Open twice inside an hour. Russell Knox holed a forty-foot putt on the last to tie Ryan Fox at fourteen under. The playoff went back to the same hole, both men found the green in two, and Knox holed from almost exactly the same spot again. Fox's reply from inside fifteen feet lipped out. Knowing that does not make the hole play any easier, but it does make you take more care over the second shot than you otherwise would.

If you want a criticism, it is about the ground rather than the design. For a course sitting in that much duneland the fairways are surprisingly flat, and there are very few blind shots. If you came to Ballyliffin expecting the terrain to throw the ball around, that is the Old Links next door, and you should play both on the same day. We did, and the contrast is the single best argument for driving this far.

So: play it, and build a north-west itinerary around it rather than fitting it in. It is better golf than its ranking suggests and considerably quieter than its reputation should allow.