The Full Irish: Royal Portrush (Dunluce)
We travel to a spot on The Open rota. Are we ready for this?
When you set out to book an Ireland golf vacation and you’re bold and brash enough to want to play some of the truly marquee courses, as noted earlier you need to find out when you can play a handful of courses, and work the rest of your schedule around that. Atop that list is Royal County Down, as noted – and not far behind that is Royal Portrush. And somehow, it ended up that we booked them for consecutive days.
It would be gross if it wasn’t so great.
Founded: 1888, 1932
Designer: Harry Colt
Ratings:
Top100GolfCourses: 11 (Worldwide) 6 (Britain & Ireland) 2 (Northern Ireland)
Golf.com: 5 (UK & Ireland)
The Irish Golfer: 1 (Ireland)
Those are some fairly great rankings, and The Irish Golfer (a site I only learned about fairly recently) continues to rank this as the best course on the island, which is bold but not insane. The pedigree here is impressive. Royal Portrush, as fans of pro golf know, is one of the few courses outside Scotland and England to have hosted The Open, doing so in 2019 and it shall return in 2025. In dramatic fashion, Shane Lowry won it back in 2019 which was one of the more fun Opens I can remember watching, not just because he grew up not far from the course, but because it was fairly competitive and the course was just not something we’d seen before.
Royal Portrush doesn’t have the massive dunes of its neighbor, Portstewart, but it’s a far cry topographically from most Open rota courses, and a great addition.
Our day started in Newcastle and we headed up to the Portstewart area, with the plan to give ourselves enough time to arrive, stretch and maybe even hit a few golf balls before our round.
For Thunder, that was made considerably tougher by a tire - sorry, tyre - blowout on the drive, but it turns out folks are prepared for this from some fairly bad roads so he got a mini-F1 team to swap out a new one in time for him to make our tee time with over 20 minutes to spare.
As noted, it was just four years ago they played The Open, and one of the easy memories for me is the opening hole. There was a lot of whinging about the internal OB off to the left or right of the fairway and I guess with a ton of wind, maybe those are in play but for us, it wasn’t too tough to find the fairway. Getting to the hole from there was more challenging - I hit the top of the hill, and it rolled back, getting stuck ABOVE the bunker. My caddie said to me, “You’d be a lot happier if that had actually gone INTO the bunker. Please don’t fall in and hurt yourself.” Things got even wackier from there. The opening par streak was ended, fairly brutally.
But then the course opened up even more and it just got better every single hole.
One critique one might have for courses like Portmarnock and Royal County Down is even though they are links courses, they don’t always feel connected to the water. That’s no such criticism of Portrush, which certainly shows off the sea on a number of holes, including the 5th where the green hovers above the beach cliffs. (In fact, if you truly overshoot the green, the ball is rolling down those cliffs onto that beach.) In the distance, you can even see the ruins of Dunluce Castle.
I’ll admit that there are a few holes that have utterly escaped my memory after playing, which is probably more of a reflection on me than the course, which was outstanding.
My immediate thoughts after finishing were that I wanted to watch highlights from the 2019 Open (though I haven’t done that just yet.
Erica and Grace went to see the aforementioned Dunluce castle while we played and said it was very cool. The initial plan had us considering sightseeing after the golf, but the round took us into the late afternoon, after which we enjoyed some pints and snacks.
Portrush added a level of toughness we hadn’t seen before with impenetrable rough - not just thick, but some vines/weeds running through it that meant you really could NOT advance more than a wedge or so to get out of the trouble. It was a reminder that a shorter, straighter shot benefits more than bombing it into the bad stuff.
After our post-round pints, we headed to our hotel. I might need an entire post on the weirdness of Me and Mrs. Jones, which calls itself a “romantic hotel” but might be a bit more frisky than that. Mirrors on the ceiling, lots of animal prints and cheeky references to sex.
But it’s also true elsewhere in the town of Portstewart, where the bars sell “Pornstar Martini’s” (which sound so gross I can’t even) or have art filled with phallic innuendo in the bathrooms. More investigation is necessary
.Also, after our round we met up with David, who has joined the group. A NEW PLAYER HAS ENTERED THE GAME. While Rob (and family) and Mark will be with us through Thursday, David will be sticking on for some time and we can’t wait to tee it up at Portstewart Golf Club tomorrow. And if we thought there were dunes before, stay tuned…