The Full Irish: Dromoland Castle
As our roster turns over again, we hit up a parkland course.
When I started putting together the rota for this trip, I had never heard Dromoland Castle. In fact, the first time I did hear about it was on a flight with Dean to Portland, OR on a separate golf trip. We were chatting about golf, including this Ireland trip, and a woman in front of us told us she’d heard our chatter and we just HAD to play this gorgeous course called Dromoland Castle.
Having done literally two years of research at that point, I was very much in the “oh, OKAY, thanks for the advice, rando” frame of mind.
We knew that our roster was changing here too - David was heading back, and AC’s younger brother - Second/Third Rob, or Big Bob, as we’ll call him - was arriving. The plan was for him to meet us in Lahinch, where we’d begin his experience at one of the world class courses on our agenda. And then, our plans to play Lahinch Golf Club shifted. We’d been waiting for them to get back on our request to play this date … when they reached out and apologized, as the course is completely closed to visitors until the following week. (Fortunately, our trip is psychotic enough we’ll still be in country so we’ll be back to Lahinch in short order.)
Our options became kind of odd - we could play the nine-hole Spanish Point and the Doolin Pitch-n-Putt, we could spend a year of our children’s college tuition at Adare Manor, or we could support a traitorous fascist and play Trump Doonbeg. None of these seemed like smart, fun options. There just weren’t that many courses close enough to make sense for us … until I noticed Dromoland Castle.
DROMOLAND CASTLE
Founded: 2002
Designer: Ron Kirby
Ratings:
Top100GolfCourses: 46 (Ireland)
The Irish Golfer: 49 (Ireland)
Golf.com: N/A
(“Oh yeah … the course that strange woman recommended on our flight to Portland.”)
It’s a parkland course - meaning unlike literally everything else we are playing, it’s not on the coast, and not a sand based golf course. But … it looked SICK.
It wasn’t exactly the way I hoped to introduce Big Bob to Irish golf, but it wasn’t a pitch-and-putt either.
The morning started with … logistics. We had dropped David off the night before in Galway, and had ourselves quite a time in Lahinch at The Nineteenth (at some point, I was behind the bar pouring a few pints), and then in the morning we had to shake that off and have AC go pick up his brother while Dean and I headed to Dromoland. A lot of balls in the air which always makes your narrator a wee bit anxious.
Fortunately, that went off fairly smoothly and the golf was … really fun. Again, being an inland course it has way less wind, and it’s more of a version of golf we are (sadly) familiar with. But it was pretty sick stuff, and there’s a giant castle in the middle of the course (that also serves as the hotel, etc.)
You might have to squint a bit but there it is in the background. And yeah, that’s a water hazard (two of them, actually) and some cart paths and again, this is the outlier golf course for the trip. But it’s a fun course (and the Women’s Irish Open is behind held there in a few weeks which will be fun to see). There’s a few centerline trees which we like, and it’s fairly hard to find fault with the course in general.
After the round, psychotic brothers AC and Big Bob went to the driving range because … well, they could. Dean and I drove out to Ballybunion, and geeked out on what lay ahead of us. Ballybunion is ranked as the best course in Ireland (which doesn’t include Northern Ireland, naturally) and has been one of those bucket list courses this trip was centered around. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy.