Ballyliffin Old: The Course Nick Faldo Tried to Buy

Gunnar Kobin

8 hours ago

4 min read

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. I love that story, and I love that they said no, and after playing the Old Links I understand exactly what he saw and exactly why they were not selling it.

He stayed involved anyway. Faldo Design's work here was finished for a reopening in June 2006, and at that reopening a seventeen-year-old Rory McIlroy, then a plus-four amateur, shot a course record 67 playing alongside him. Worth being clear about what Faldo actually did, though, because you will see the course credited to him outright and that is wrong. He added around thirty-six bunkers to a course that had four — four, across eighteen holes, for the first twenty years of its life. He put in twelve new tees. He moved the 14th green higher into the dunes so the hole now runs above the beach. And he left the 17th green, the only surviving green from the club's original nine holes, essentially as he found it.

The course itself was built between 1970 and 1973 by Eddie Hackett, working with the English architects Charles Lawrie and Frank Pennink and a club member called Martin Hopkins. That is a serious set of names for a club that had no money — Lawrie was a Walker Cup captain who laid out courses across Britain, Pennink an amateur international turned architect with work all over Europe, and Hackett the man whose fingerprints are on half the links in the west of Ireland. You will meet him again at Strandhill and Enniscrone if you are doing this trip properly.

And between them they barely built anything. They mowed the grass, put in some bunkers, made greens, and left. That was the point.

Play it in the afternoon having played Glashedy in the morning. Not because one is better. Because the second one explains the first.

Glashedy is designed golf in the good sense — shaped, balanced, championship standard. You walk off it impressed. Then you go to the first tee of the Old Links, hit a perfectly respectable drive down the middle of the fairway, walk up to it, and find the ball sitting somewhere that no amount of skill put it.

That is the Old Links. That is the whole thing.

The members have a line: the Old was fashioned by god and Glashedy by man. Members say that sort of thing everywhere. Here it happens to be close to literally true.

The fairways are the entire character of the place — a million humps and bumps, and I mean that plainly rather than as a figure of speech. The ball lands, takes a bounce nobody could have predicted, and finishes somewhere that has nothing to do with the shot you hit. You are not being punished for playing badly. You are being reminded that the ground was here a very long time before the golf was.

The 15th is where it goes furthest. I do not believe there is a single flat lie on that fairway. Wherever the ball stopped I was standing above it or below it, making a swing I have never practised and do not own. Four of us played the hole and not one of us had a level stance. That is not an exaggeration for effect — it is the hole I will still be describing to people next year. I have not seen that written down about the 15th specifically, but the course-wide version is well established by people who know far more than I do. Tom Doak reportedly said the fairways on the Old Links are the most wrinkled he has ever seen.

The shape of the property surprised me too. Large parts of it are low and open in a way that reads Scottish rather than Irish — no mounding, nothing to break the wind, the ground just lying there taking whatever the Atlantic sends. Then classic Irish sandhills appear and the character switches completely. It should feel incoherent. It does not.

The 5th is the one most people remember, a short par 3 called The Tank, uphill to a plateau green wedged between two big dunes and enclosed on three sides. The name is not romantic — there used to be a water tank near the green. Miss it and you are in real trouble in any direction. The best golf is 13 through 17, three of those along the beach with elevated tees giving you Pollan Bay.

Glashedy is the better golf course by most measures you could name, and it has the tournament record to prove it. The Old Links is the more interesting walk and the more honest one, and it is the one I would drive back for.

A caution, though. If you are only playing one round here and you like your golf tidy — good lies, predictable bounces, a fair reward for a decent swing — play Glashedy and enjoy yourself. The Old Links will annoy you. It is supposed to. Faldo did not try to buy Glashedy.