Royal Portrush still was buzzing, and champion Shane Lowry still was buzzed the Monday morning after the 2019 British Open when a taxi whisked me along the Wild Atlantic Way, the longest coastal road in the world, and across the border into Northwest Ireland.
The Wild Atlantic Way, as it’s known, offers a two-week to four-week trip that provides one-of-a-kind views of everything from the Cliffs of Moher to the Aran Islands. Glaciated valleys and steep cliffs make every leg of this journey unique, and that goes double for the golf, which for me meant discovering four links courses and one parkland layout for the first time.
I’m embarrassed to admit it, but when I first read my trip itinerary, I’d never heard of my first stop, Cruit Island, let alone had any clue the proper pronunciation of its name (Critch Island). But this quirky slab of land on the edge of the country – next stop America, they joke – came to represent everything I loved about this trip and golf in Ireland.
I already had been fortunate enough on previous trips to check off several of the trophy courses that dot the Emerald Isle, long touting Royal County Down just south of Belfast in Northern Ireland as my top-ranked course. But if you only play the Ballybunions and Watervilles and Tralees, you’ve missed out on walking towering dunes that seem to go on forever and sweeping valleys at seaside courses that are often half as expensive and twice as much fun as their better-known venues. Some say the western coast of Ireland, where Donegal alone counts 16 links golf courses, can lay claim to the finest array of links courses in the world, and it’s gone next level since I was there.
Such as the nine-hole wonder that is Cruit Island, which thankfully my driver knew how to find because it takes considerable effort to do so. It is linked to the mainland by bridge and requires driving another mile and half after you seemingly come to the end of the road. It was built in 1982 by the community using nothing more than shovels, a wheel barrow, a tractor and good old-fashioned sweat equity. Local golfers did so because they tired of traveling some 20 miles for a game at the nearest course, so they negotiated a sweetheart deal for the land from a local church and designed the no-frills course with its simple clubhouse themselves.
“We moved almost nothing,” said Paddy Sweeney, the club’s jovial president, as he shared the compelling backstory.
The land was so dramatic that it revealed to them the most wonderful sites for tees and greens that never could have been constructed with bulldozers and earth scrapers.
The sun was shining and the sky was blue when I made my way to the first tee. Sweeney, with a mischievous glint in his eyes, warned my group, “This is the windiest course you’ll ever play.” It was blowing 30 mph, but his face turned as serious as a clock when he described the current conditions as “just a wee bit of wind.”
The view from the first tee is a blow to the senses and rivals anything you’ll see on the Monterey Peninsula, leading some to boldly claim it is “Pebble Beach on steroids.” That it may be, but a scruffier, more rough-around-the-edges version. We could do without the unsightly phone lines, but these eyesores are canceled out by plenty of eye candy along the way. None more so than the par-3 sixth hole that had us grabbing our phones to snap pictures and shoot video. The sixth runs along a rocky coastline and is all carry over a deep and craggy Atlantic inlet to a long, narrow green perched at the edge of a cliff with pounding white surf below. The hole measures only 150 yards from the tips, but the question is always: What club will it be today? A short flick of the wedge, or a fully struck wood?
In his book “A Course Called Ireland,” Tom Coyne went so far as to tab Cruit’s sixth as, yard for yard, one of the best holes in the world. This walk through a natural and humbling setting, where seven of the nine holes present blind shots, felt pure and uncommercialized, the way golf was played before it became big business. Google “hidden gem” and Cruit Island’s picture should pop up among the top listings. Special place and a great start to my trip.
