Narin & Portnoo: They Strapped the Flags to the Poles

Gunnar Kobin

7 hours ago

4 min read

I have played golf in wind before. I had never played a course where somebody had gone out before us and strapped the flags to the pins so they would not blow away.

That decided the day. The greens played slow — not badly kept, but nothing was going to run true into that. We were aiming thirty metres off line on approach shots and hoping. Putts that should have been quick were being knocked at. By the fourth hole nobody in the group was talking about their score any more, which, in fairness, is usually when a round starts being enjoyable.

There has been golf here since 1905, nine holes from 1930 and eighteen from 1965, and nobody you would call an architect was ever really in charge of it. The course grew by accretion, shaped by members and local men — Hughie McNeill and Leo Wallace among them — with Eddie Connaughton brought in for improvements in 2004. That is how you end up with what the club now candidly calls a patchwork of styles, and a par that had crept up to 73. It was also close to bankrupt. Closure was a real possibility, not a dramatic way of describing a bad balance sheet.

It was bought by two Connecticut-based Irishmen, Liam McDevitt and Larry Foley. McDevitt had spent childhood holidays forty-five minutes down the road near Ballyshannon, which is the sort of connection that explains why anyone would take on a failing golf club in Donegal.

Then the lucky part, and it is a very good piece of luck. The two of them happened to be members at Winged Foot and Rockaway Hunting Club — both of which Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner were renovating at the time. Hanse is the architect who built the Olympic course in Rio and has since been handed Oakmont, Merion, Los Angeles Country Club and a long list of others; he is, by most reckonings, the most in-demand golf architect alive. He and Wagner came out to look at a failing club in Donegal in filthy weather in late 2017 and took the job anyway.

What they did was not a tidy-up. Of nineteen existing greens, exactly one survived untouched. Fifteen were relocated, four of them pushed closer to the sea. Old holes were combined, three consecutive par 5s on the back nine were broken up, and par came down from 73 to 70. The work ran in two phases from October 2018 and the course reopened in mid-2020. The club maintains twenty-two holes and rotates the spares in and out of play.

So this is a Gil Hanse golf course, five years old, sitting 18th in Ireland and climbing.

It still does not feel like a logical golf course. The routing is eclectic. Some holes are clearly better than others. There is no rhythm to it — no sense of a round building toward something, which is exactly what Glashedy does so well two hours up the coast. If you arrive looking for coherent architecture you will find things to argue with, and you will not be alone in it; more than one reviewer who liked the place more than I did has reached for the word disjointed.

But I do not think coherence is what this course is selling, and I do not think Hanse thought so either. Every green he moved, he moved toward the water. The value at Narin & Portnoo is not the design. It is the drama of the sea, and somebody understood that clearly enough to spend the money in the right direction.

The first few holes are a prelude. They are fine. They do not prepare you at all.

Then the 6th, 7th and 8th, which are as dramatic as links golf gets. The 6th is a short par 3 from one dune top to another across a big grassy hollow. The 7th is a short downhill par 4 with the green on the very edge of the Atlantic, hidden behind a dune from one side of the fairway and visible from the other. The 8th tees off beside the ocean, blind over a ridge, to a green wrapped in nothing but sea. In the wind we had, the 7th was drivable and the 8th was barely reachable in three. Those holes would be famous if they sat ninety minutes from Dublin instead of out on Gweebarra Bay.

The 18th is the strangest golf hole I played all week and I want to describe it properly, because I have not seen it written up anywhere. It is a long par 5 and for most of its length it is like walking on the moon — one hump and hollow after another, no flat ground anywhere, no obvious line, the ball disappearing into dips and reappearing somewhere unrelated. Then at about 150 metres from the green it simply stops and flattens into an entirely ordinary approach, as though the course ran out of interesting ground and admitted it. I honestly cannot tell you whether it is a good hole. I have thought about it more than any other hole on the trip.

This is my favourite thing about the place. The clubhouse is very small, and the green fee comes with a meal and a pint. Not a voucher toward one, not a discount — the fee includes hot food and a drink. I have not come across that anywhere else at this standard of golf course. After the round we had, it felt less like hospitality and more like medical attention.

It is quiet, too. Americans working through a bucket-list itinerary are not filling this tee sheet, and the place is much better for it.

Final word. Go, but go knowing what it is. You do not play Narin & Portnoo for the architecture, famous architect notwithstanding. You play it for six or seven holes as good as the coastline gets, for a clubhouse that feeds you, and for the chance of a day when the Atlantic decides to show you what it can actually do.