Enniscrone Golf Club

Enniscrone Golf Club was reconfigured around the turn of the century and is now one of the best links courses in Ireland. 

Enniscrone started out as a nine-hole course just after the First World War but Eddie Hackett gave it substance with a 1974 extension to 18. That is not the end of the Enniscrone journey though – Donald Steel was drafted in around the turn of the new Millennium to add another nine and reconfigure the existing holes.

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It is now a course worthy of its status in our GB&I Top 100, returning to the fold in 2012 and staying there ever since.

“I considered myself very fortunate to be given the opportunity to work on Enniscrone because it is rare these days that course architects are able to work with genuine pieces of linksland,” Steel told Golf World.

“What’s more, the terrain I was given was the best land on the property on which to build golf holes. The dunes really are quite magnificent and the club did very well to secure them and get permission from local planners and conservationalists. The dunes there are mountainous – I would say they are the Himalayas of sand dunes. On the 14th they simply tower about you.”

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Steel, a great amateur golfer turned writer and designer, is not exaggerating. The best holes at Enniscrone are very special, as a result of him being given such superb land with which to work.

Word has it Hackett yearned for the chance to move onto that terrain but the club did not possess the funds to acquire and develop it.

And even in the holes he worked on only in part, Steel managed to elicit something special, the par-4 1st being an amalgamation of an original hole with his input – the new twist being a green which sits on a shelf within the dunes.

The rest of the front nine is a pleasant mixture of new and old before the fun really begins at the 12th, a quirky short par-4 dog-leg which can be played in many different ways. The strategists among you may not especially enjoy it, but no-one will ever forget it – not least the enormous dune out of which the green was cut.

The 16th, some holes later, is the most visually impressive hole at Enniscrone, a short-ish par 5 which is played down a narrow dune-lined fairway to a tilting green.

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But perhaps the best hole is the 14th, played from an elevated tee to a fairway lined by gigantic dunes and finishing on a green which slopes from back to front.

Or maybe it is the 15th, a stroke index 1 two-shotter alongside the beach which is guarded by a greenside mound.

You get the idea; this is a terrific back nine in serious dunes – the kind of which aren’t witnessed very often in Britain outside the likes of Hillside and Trump International.

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