Howth: Mind the 17th

Gunnar Kobin

1 day ago

4 min read

The course guide at Howth Golf Club contains an instruction I have not seen at any other club. On the 11th, it tells you that the 11th and 17th fairways cross, and that players on the 17th have right of way. On the 17th, it tells you to beware of players coming up the 11th. On another hole it asks you to check the fairway is clear before you tee off. And on the 1st there is a custom that one member of the group stays visible until everybody's approach is on the green.

There is also a public right of way for walkers straight across the course.

I would like to tell you this is a design flaw and that it spoils the round. It is not and it does not. It is the single most characterful thing about a golf course that I liked far more than I expected to.

The reason for all of it is land, or rather the shortage of it. In 1915 a Scottish businessman called A. A. Butson, who ran a temperance hotel in Howth, leased eighty acres on the Hill of Howth from the Gaisford St. Lawrence family at Howth Castle and hired Tom Shannon, the professional at Portmarnock, to lay out nine holes. The first captain was elected in 1916. In 1919 the members bought the whole operation off Butson for £800 and turned a commercial punt into a members' club.

Then, in the late 1920s, they wrote to James Braid.

He came over, proposed a new eighteen, and charged them twenty-eight guineas plus expenses. Five Open Championships, and the fee of a decent suit. Extra land was scraped together — twelve acres here, thirty there — and the Scottish contractors J. R. Stutt & Co. spent fourteen months clearing thick gorse and heather and building to his plan. The course opened on 15 June 1929 with the head of the Irish government doing the honours. The overdraft was not cleared until 1937.

Braid liked a dogleg, and Howth is full of them. He went on to lay out Mullingar, Newlands and Waterford in Ireland, but this is the one where you can see him solving a problem rather than designing a golf course — eighty acres plus a bit is simply not enough room for eighteen of his holes without them bumping into each other.

The other thing you feel here, and it is the first thing I would actually tell anybody, is the openness.

You are on top of a hill and there is nothing between you and the weather. No shelter, no framing, no corridor of trees or dunes to hit down. The ground falls away in every direction, the wind has nothing to break it, and every shot is played against a horizon rather than into a gap. It reminded me immediately of the Costa Navarino courses, and specifically of that — the exposure of being up high with the world laid out underneath you. Very few Irish courses feel like it.

The views come with it. Dublin spread out below, the Wicklow Mountains south, Ireland's Eye and Lambay north, and across the water you can pick out the Malahide courses, so you spend the round looking at golf you played on other days. The club reckons you can see between sixteen and twenty-three other courses from the property. I did not count.

A correction to how I would have described this place before playing it: it is not a links. The club calls it heathland links style and the ranking panels call it heathland-cum-downland. Rocky, gorse-and-heather ground high above the sea, and it plays nothing like the week we had just had up north.

The greens are the puzzle. Some are tiny. Many are raised, so a merely adequate approach gets rejected rather than held. Others are saucers that gather everything toward the middle. There is no single type to prepare for and you have to read each one on its own terms, which after a week of links surfaces took some adjusting to.

The 11th caught me out and I would warn anyone. It slopes hard at the front, and a ball that does not arrive high enough simply runs back off and leaves you playing the same shot again from where you started. I did exactly that, which is how I know. It is also, as established, the hole where you have to look over your shoulder for the 17th.

What I do not understand about Howth is that there are no caddies.

Two of the first three holes are blind off the tee by the club's own description, and a number of greens sit over a rise where you are hitting at a hilltop and hoping. A visitor genuinely needs local knowledge here. Almost every course we played on this trip had caddies available for holes that needed them far less than these do. Howth, which needs them most, has none. If anybody at the club reads this: there is a business sitting there.

The condition was superb. Better than anything else we played all week, and better than courses charging considerably more, which is not what I expected from a club that has spent a century short of both land and money.

Play it. I would say that more strongly than the rankings justify, because it sits well down the Dublin lists and has no real national ranking at all. It is a proper golf course built on a hillside too small for it, and the compromises that forces on it are exactly why you will remember it.

If you are in Dublin with a spare morning either side of the famous names on the coast, this is a far better use of it than another round on flat ground. Just let the 17th go first.