Golf In Northern Ireland
Driving from course to course along the hair-raisingly narrow roads, you may feel that you are en route to something like the heart of golf — the place where the game is both harder and almost infinitely more rewarding.
The holes are winding between dunes and sand hills, sometimes in view of the sea, sometimes inland, and you glimpse your fellow golfers only in the distance. There is no point in checking the forecast, because the weather loop seems to be on fast forward all the time, with mists and showers and low-hanging clouds suddenly punctuated by miraculous bursts of sunlight and bright blue sky.
Near around, there’re two lovely guesthouses Edenvale House in Newtownards, on Strangford Lough in County Down, and Hillrise Dhu Varren in Portrush (where, if you like, the porridge comes laced with whiskey).If you choose to have a snack there,you’ll be treated as a member of the family, rather than a visitor.
It is interesting that nine of the holes, built in 1992, were designed not by some famous course architect but by a local member and schoolteacher, Des Giffin. There are two schools of thought about Royal County Down, an hour and half away in the resort town of Newcastle, on Dundrum Bay at the bottom of the Mountains of Mourne.
