Best of the Rest in Southwest Ireland

Take a dunes journey through the fiercest fairways in Southwest Ireland

By Jim Bebbington

At the ends of many a long, winding ride through the one-lane roads of County Kerry, there are dunes golf experiences that are unlike anything a golf traveler can find elsewhere.

The front nine of Tralee Golf Course is dotted with ruins and stone fences.

If you want to test your game against the soaring dunes of Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way, here are three other courses worth your time.

TRALEE GOLF CLUB

In the 1970s, a popular series of golf paintings by artist Bud Chapman featured drawings of people playing fantastical golf holes all over the world. Players putted on greens perilously close to a sheer cliff of the Grand Canyon, or they teed off from a rock outcropping at Victoria Falls, trying to hit a green jutting out from a distant cliff wall and blanketed with mist from the falls.

Outside of the village of Tralee, the Arnold Palmer-designed Tralee Golf Club features a par 3, No. 13, that is the closest thing in the actual, real universe to those paintings that I’ve ever seen.

From the tee box, you fire across a 150-yard-wide chasm of sand dunes covered in beachgrass. The surface of the green is hard to see – it’s straight across this valley at almost the exact elevation of the tee box. You see a wall of dunes rising from the crevasse below, a lonely pin, and then a wall of dunes rising still more behind it.

While playing it last summer, we survived it, then, passing it later in the round, watched in horror as a group behind us sent a caddy down the sheer sand wall to retrieve an errant drive. The poor lad needed ropes and hiking crampons to get back up. Palmer once quipped that he may have designed Tralee’s front side, but only God could have created that back nine.

He was not kidding.

Tralee’s Hole 13

The front nine actual holes – fairways and greens – are fine. They are flatish and weave between innocent old farm fences with pretty amazing castle ruins visible just across a small bay. But the golf holes themselves are gettable.

Then you have a hot dog and a quick beer and walk through the back of a wardrobe into golf Narnia. The dunes of the back nine of Tralee are simply fantastic and the course finishes with fairways that heave up and down and sideways. You will never forget this back nine.

Summer Costs: $421 TraleeGolfClub.Com

WATERVILLE GOLF LINKS

I played this world-class destination last summer with my brother-in-law, who, it must be said, is not a man who faces golf adversity like Patton faced Rommel – head on.

If there’s an easy way out of a golf situation, that’s for him. A golf-masochist he is not. And yet there we were walking to the tee box of the par 3 No. 17 when he said to our group, “Let’s go all the way back to the tips on this one.”

What?! “Trust me.”

And that is how we found ourselves staring at a Mona Lisa of golf holes. It is world famous, a 200-yard risk/risk test with YouTube videos galore extolling the view from the back tee, high on a dunes landscape.

The mountain range visible across the bay leaps southward toward the sea, and this was the moment when we realized that these islands and the Hawaiian Islands were both formed by volcanoes. Our round at Waterville – which is perched at the very end of one of the peninsulas that form the southwest Irish coast – was a difficult mix. We got pelted with rain on the front nine, and it frankly was a slog.

Then the clouds broke, and a glorious back nine beckoned.

The thing about these dunes is that they are so tall that they take away one of the benefits of being a bad golfer. In many of the great Scotland courses, if you are going to slice your drive, you want to SLICE your drive. You’ll find yourself pleasantly in a neighboring fairway with just a slightly tricky recovery shot back to your own green.

At Waterville, if you go off track, you are toast. The course logo is a hare of the kind that you’ll see hopping across many of the fairways as you play. But if you go deep enough into these dunes looking for a bad drive, you may stumble into an entire secret hare-based civilization, like with roads and schools and hare villages – and never be seen again.

Summer Costs: $400 weekdays; $421 weekends Watervillegolflinks.ie.

DOOKS GOLF CLUB

When I mentioned to locals that my group was finishing our Ireland golf trip with a round at the Dooks Golf Club, I was greeted with smiles and encouragement.

“Oh, you’ll love it,” they said. “It’s just such a simple, calm course. A perfect way to finish after playing all the big names around here.”

The parking lot here is rarely packed with tour buses. It’s only 6,500 from the back tees, and the dune heights and contours looked downright tame as we pulled our trollies confidently toward the first tee.

And that is how we got our teeth kicked in by a pleasant little Irish course. Because for the first time all week, the winds picked up and despite blue, sunny warmth around us, continued to gale through all 18 holes. The dunes experience here may lack the glories of Tralee or Ballybunion, but there is still plenty to challenge you. Every hole is winding and there are more than a few raised green complexes that require excellent distance control. Which is fine, so long as there’s no wind off Dingle Bay. If there is, just hang on for dear life.

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Jim Bebbington is the Director of Content at Colorado AvidGolfer and can be reached at [email protected]

Colorado AvidGolfer Magazine is the state’s leading resource for golf and the lifestyle that surrounds it, publishing eight issues annually and proudly delivering daily content via coloradoavidgolfer.com.

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