Strandhill: Playing Under Queen Maeve

Gunnar Kobin

7 hours ago

4 min read

There is a mountain standing over this golf course called Knocknarea, and the lump on top of it is a neolithic cairn that is traditionally held to be the grave of Queen Maeve. Nobody has ever excavated it. It has sat up there for something like five thousand years, and you spend your round underneath it.

You cannot really escape it either. It watches the opening holes, and then the par-3 17th, which is actually named Knocknarea, points you straight back at it downhill. Clubs spend serious money trying to manufacture a backdrop. Strandhill was handed one before anybody in Ireland had thought of hitting a ball with a stick.

We came here the day after the storm at Narin & Portnoo, and that context matters. Somewhere in the middle of a week of hard links golf you need a course you play rather than survive, and this was it. That is not damning it with faint praise — it is the reason I would put Strandhill on a north-west itinerary ahead of at least one better-known name.

Let me get the awkward part out of the way first, because I would rather you heard it from me than discovered it on the first green.

The condition is not up to the rest of the week. The greens were slow. The fairways were not as good as anything we played in Donegal or Down. There is a reason, and it is not neglect: this is a members' club that has been through a brutal financial history. After the crash, when Ulster Bank sold the club's loans on to a vulture fund, the members raised over €600,000 between themselves to buy their own debt back and keep the place in their own hands. The money has gone into survival and into the ground rather than into presentation. Arrive expecting Ballyliffin's surfaces and you will spend the day irritated. Arrive knowing, and you will have a very good time.

Because the golf is genuinely fun.

The 5th is the hole everybody should know about. It is played from the most elevated tee on the property with a view in every direction, and the fairway is the most gloriously rumpled piece of ground on the course — humps and hollows so numerous that it is a job just to pick a route through them. The club's own note on the hole ends with the line that birdie or not, you will remember it forever, which is exactly the sort of thing clubs write and then, unusually, turn out to be right about.

The 13th is the quirkiest hole I played in Ireland. Blind tee shot over a white stone into a narrow fairway that snakes away from you, then a small green ringed by dunes. There is no way to work the line out for yourself and your eye will tell you something confidently wrong. Whatever your caddie says, take it. I did not, once. It cost me.

The 15th needs thinking about on the tee rather than in the fairway. Get the drive as far up as you dare, because the alternative is a long iron into a very high green, and a long iron runs over the back of that green every time. There is no clever recovery and no way to hold it from distance. The work is done off the tee or it is not done at all.

And the 10th tee box sits directly in front of the church, which is a strange and slightly self-conscious thing to be standing in front of with a driver in your hands, trying to look like somebody who knows what he is doing.

A few other things worth knowing. Several of the back-nine greens are small, which catches you after a front nine that lets you be careless. The 3rd runs along the beach — the club's own course guide mentions that horses may be galloping there, and they were. And the 7th tees off beside Strandhill beach, which means you are hitting a golf shot over surfers. I have not done that anywhere else in my life.

The history, for what it is worth, is short and scrappy in a way I rather like. The club started in 1931 with nine holes and a green tin shed for a clubhouse near what is now the 7th green. A second nine by the Dublin architect John McAlister opened in 1940, and the course went to eighteen in 1973.

Who did that last bit is oddly contested. Most published sources credit Eddie Hackett, which would make Strandhill the third course on this trip with his name on it after Ballyliffin Old and Enniscrone, and it fits — Hackett habitually worked for almost nothing and left the ground alone, and that is exactly what this place looks like. The club's own history is vaguer, and at least one account gives the job to Johnny McGonigle, the professional at County Sligo up the road. Christy O'Connor Snr called it the hidden jewel of the West, whoever built it.

Since 2016 the Scottish architect Ally McIntosh, with his design partner James Coughlan, has been working through a long improvement plan. The first phase was a complete rebunkering — revetted faces near the fairways and greens, ragged edges further out — built in-house by the club's own greens staff rather than by a contractor, which tells you as much about Strandhill as anything else in this piece. The current clubhouse went up after the old one burned down in 2005, and it looks out at the mountain.

The weak stretch is 16 to 18, over duller ground, and the closing two holes are long enough that at the end of a hard week they felt like a punishment rather than a finish. Nobody in the group disagreed about that.

Should you play it? Yes, if you are in Sligo and have the day, and especially if you have something brutal on either side of it in the schedule. Strandhill is not the best course in the north west and it is not trying to be. It is the one you will be glad you added, and the one where you will actually enjoy yourself rather than merely admire things.

Take a caddie. Take one for the 13th alone.