Carne Golf Links - Ireland

Carne is one of the wonderful, storm-tossed, remote, and not particularly well-known links of northwest Ireland, lying at the tip of the Belmullet Peninsula past the small village of Belmullet and overlooking Blacksod Bay. Opened in 1995, Carne owes its formation to Michael Mangan, who upon returning to County Mayo from London in the early 1980s, purchased a small farm, including a one-seventeenth share of a commonage-that is, shared grazing rights on agriculturally poor land. A couple of years later, when Mangan actually saw the grazing land, he recognized that the magnificent dunescape would make the ideal site for a golf course. Then came the difficult job of persuading each of the farmers who had a stake in the commonage to sell their share and raising the necessary funds to buy them out. Eddie Hackett, the foremost Irish course architect, was brought in when he was nearly 80 years old to design the course, walking the dunes and making drawings each night in his B & B. The result is a bodacious and boisterous links, laid out on a small budget through the cui de sacs and crannies of the massive dunes.

Country Sligo Golf Club - Ireland

County Sligo Golf Club, or Rosses Point, is the unsurpassed links of northwest Ireland, running through the lyrical landscape made famous in the poetry of William Butler Yeats. The course lies at the tip of Rosses Point, the five-mile sliver of land that runs out to the sea and along the channel that leads to Sligo Town and its harbor. Across from the quaint, black and white Tudor clubhouse lies the original Coney Island. The club was founded in la94 by British army officers, with the original nine holes laid out by George Combe, who played a leading role at Royal County Down. The present design owes much to a week-long visit by the great English architect, Harry Colt, in June 1927. Rosses Point has been described as "golf's magic stepladder" and from the high ground there are sweeping panoramas over Sligo Bay and to the interior mountains, with the green summit of Knocknarea where the mythic warrior Queen Maeve is reputed to be buried. Above the course as it loops inland looms "bare Ben Bulben's head," the flat-topped mountain for which the 10th hole is named, with Drumcliff Estuary running below. Yeats is buried in the Drumcliff churchyard, its steeple visible from the course, under the plain limestone tombstone that bears his epitaph.