Jameson Links: Better Second Time But Still Not Good

Gunnar Kobin

7 hours ago

5 min read

The first time I played this course, in 2022, I hated it.

I want to be honest about why, because the reason turned out to have very little to do with the golf course. We played Portmarnock that morning. One of the great championship links in the world, immediately next door, and we walked off it and came straight here for the afternoon round. Nothing was ever going to survive that comparison. I stood on the first tee of Jameson Links with Portmarnock still in my legs and then spent four hours noticing everything this place was not.

Coming back this September without that shadow over it, it was considerably better than I remembered.

That is not a rave. It is a correction, and I think it is worth writing down because the mistake I made is the mistake half the golfers who dislike this course have probably made. It sits on the same peninsula as one of the best courses in Ireland and it gets played on the same trip, often the same day, and it loses that fight every single time.

So here is the course on its own terms.

It splits in two, and the split is the whole character of it. The first seven or eight holes play farthest from the sea, across open, gently rolling ground ringed with pot bunkers. They feel Scottish — low, wide, honest, wind coming straight through. Then from the 9th onward you are up in the dunes with the water, on the holes that have had the money spent on them.

And here is what surprised me on the second visit. The Scottish holes are the better golf.

I have thought about why. The open holes feel found. The dune holes feel built, and where an Irish links has been made rather than discovered it reads as made, and no amount of shaping hides it. The back nine has the views and the photographs. The front nine has the better golf holes. Most reviewers say the opposite — that the flattish early holes are what keeps the course out of the top rankings. I would put the emphasis the other way round.

The bigger issue is that it lacks flow. It feels eclectic, a collection of holes rather than a round with a shape to it. The two idioms sit beside each other and never resolve, and you finish without the sense of having been taken anywhere.

Some of that is recent, and some of it is original.

The course is Bernhard Langer's, designed in 1992 with Stan Eby of European Golf Design and opened in 1995. It was Langer's first links, taken on by a man who had won three Irish Opens a few miles away and presumably thought he understood the brief. That matters to how the place reads: a great player's idea of a links, built rather than found, by an architect whose instincts were formed on the courses he had competed on.

Then from 2022 Jeff Lynch, director and senior architect at (re)GOLF, ran a two-year rebuild — several new green complexes and tees, a number of holes changing par, and a lot of the cavernous sod-wall bunkering that used to torment visitors replaced with something more forgiving. The stated aim was to raise tees and greens so that you can actually see the Irish Sea, because Langer's original had you tucked in behind the dunes with the water hidden. So you are now playing a second architect's correction of a first architect's idea, which may be part of why it never quite settles into one thing.

It was called Portmarnock Hotel & Golf Links until October 2023, when the long-running confusion with the club next door was finally settled by the rename.

Two things you should know before you book.

The flight path is a genuine problem. You are directly under the approach into Dublin airport and it is not occasional, it is constant. I have seen one review mention it and call it a small price to pay. I would not be that relaxed. It takes something away from a round you are supposed to be immersed in, and on a course already asking you to work at liking it, that matters.

And the local verdict is not kind. Our coach driver, who ferries golfers around Dublin for a living and hears every opinion there is, told us plainly that a lot of people do not like this course. He was not being diplomatic about it. When the man who drives the bus says that, he is reporting the accumulated view of several thousand visiting golfers, and it is worth more than most reviews.

Our caddie, on the other hand, was excellent value. The best story involved an American visitor who threw a club at him after a bad shot and got himself banned from the course for it. I have left the name out, and if you repeat the story you should too.

Now the part that made me warmer toward the place than any of the golf did.

There is a graveyard beside the first fairway, and three of the Jamesons are buried in it, John among them. John Jameson III bought 600 acres of the Portmarnock peninsula in 1847 and built a house overlooking the ruins of St Marnock's church — that house is now part of the hotel you check into. In the 1850s he laid out a private nine holes through the dunes for visiting Scots. Follow those dates and it predates Royal Belfast in 1881 and Royal Dublin in 1885, which makes this among the very oldest golfing ground in Ireland. In 1894 he leased land at the southern end of the peninsula to the founders of Portmarnock Golf Club — a lease, not the gift the caddie version has it as — and his son became that club's first president. Jameson's own course fell out of use, but three of the old hole corridors survived and were built back into the layout you play today.

Which is a strange thing to think about while you are stood on the first tee being irritated by an aeroplane. Both courses on this peninsula exist because of the same man, and the famous one exists because he leased the land away.

There may be a final chapter. Portmarnock Golf Club is in line to host an Open Championship, mooted for 2032, which would be the first ever played outside the UK. If that happens, this course almost certainly becomes part of the infrastructure around it — which closes a loop the Jamesons opened in the 1850s, back when the land on both sides of the fence belonged to one family.

Play it if you are in Dublin with days to fill. Just do not play it the same afternoon as Portmarnock, which is exactly what I did and exactly why I got it wrong. Give it its own morning.

It is better than its reputation among people who played it once and left annoyed. I was one of them for four years.