Enniscrone: Overrated Hardcore Irish Dunes Links

Gunnar Kobin

7 hours ago

4 min read

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.

I had not. The second round made the case stronger rather than weaker, and it did so while the course was holding the title of Irish Golf Course of the Year.

That is a fairly loud thing to say about a course with real credentials, so let me set the argument out properly rather than just being contrary.

Start with what is good, because a lot of it is very good. The dunes here are enormous, and that part is not marketing. Tom Coyne, who has played more Irish golf than almost anybody alive, called this probably the best course in Ireland off the beaten track. The stretch from the 12th to the 16th is superb — plateau tees dropping into valleys between the sandhills, approaches you can bump or pitch or putt depending on your nerve, and one green cut straight into the side of a dune called Cnoc na gCorp, the hill of bodies, named for a battle between the Vikings and the O'Dowd clan where the dead were supposedly piled up to form the ridge. On both visits that run was the best golf of the day by a distance.

One correction while I am here, because you will hear it at the club and read it in every write-up. The dunes get described as among the biggest in Europe. Every reliable source I can find says Ireland, not Europe, and among Irish courses only Carne gets mentioned in the same breath. It is a good claim. It does not need inflating. So here is the problem, and it was the same problem in 2022.

There is not enough dune for eighteen golf holes.

Look at where the round actually goes. You start up in the sandhills and it is excellent. Then from around the 5th through the 10th the course moves out onto flat inland ground and the character changes completely — back and forth over ordinary terrain, with one genuinely good exception running along the beach. Then it climbs back into the dunes for the closing stretch and becomes excellent again.

That is not just my reading of it. It is the consistent verdict of reviewers who rate this course far higher than I do — that middle stretch gets called bland, gets described as the course losing its way, gets flagged as not matching the duneland excitement.

And once you know who built what, it stops looking like bad luck and starts looking structural. The club dates to 1918. Eddie Hackett took it to eighteen holes in the early 1970s, and Hackett being Hackett — a man who worked cheaply, moved almost no earth and is the single most prolific name in Irish links golf — he used mostly flat farmland and only skirted the outer edges of the dunes. Then between 1999 and 2001 Donald Steel, working with Martin Ebert, built six new holes that drove deep into the sandhills Hackett had left alone. Six. The rest stayed where it was.

Mackenzie & Ebert advise the club now, which is the same Ebert and about as good a pair of hands as exists for links work, so the direction of travel is right. But six new holes cannot fix a routing that spends a third of its round on the wrong ground.

So you play one golf course, then a different one, then back to the first. The two halves never resolve into a single round.

The second complaint is the blind shots. There are a great many here, and they arrive in clumps rather than spread through the round. Once or twice a blind shot is one of the real pleasures of links golf — you walk over the ridge not knowing what you will find. Strung together it stops being charm and becomes tedium, because you are never actually looking at the golf hole you are playing. You are looking at a marker stone and a slope, and then walking.

I thought that the first time, when everything was unfamiliar and I could tell myself the problem was me. I thought it again this time knowing exactly what was over each ridge, which if anything made it worse. The anticipation only works once.

Then the caddie, and I want to be careful because this is a person doing a job and not a fault of the golf course. Ours was not good. The strategy was relentlessly conservative — lay up, safe side, never take anything on — which is sensible advice for a weak player and was never adjusted after watching any of us hit a golf ball. The green reading was worse. It was wrong often enough, and confidently enough, that I stopped asking around the 8th and went back to reading them myself, which is not what you pay a caddie for. If you are taking one here, ring the club beforehand and ask for somebody experienced rather than accepting whoever is next on the list.

What I will give this place without any qualification at all is the welcome. The staff were genuinely friendly on both visits four years apart, which suggests culture rather than a good day. And the seafood chowder in the clubhouse is outstanding, one of the best things I ate on the whole trip. I am not saying that to soften what came before it — a clubhouse is part of the day, and this is a good one.

So where does that leave it. Enniscrone has perhaps eight or nine holes that belong in any serious conversation about Irish links golf and nine or ten that do not. If it had been built as a twelve-hole course it would be famous. Stretched to eighteen across ground that cannot support eighteen, it is a course with a very good half.

Play it if you are in the north west and have the days — those dune holes are worth seeing, and I would not want to talk anybody out of the 12th through the 16th. Do not build the trip around it. And do not let anyone tell you it belongs in the same conversation as the courses further north.

Twice now, four years apart. Same answer both times.