Rosapenna,
situated on County Donegal’s Rosguill Peninsula in the extreme northwest of
Ireland, was traditionally
overlooked when a roll call of Ireland’s great golf locales was
taken. The links laid out by Old Tom Morris in 1891 was pleasant enough, but
hardly worth a go-at-all-costs pilgrimage, especially considering its remote
location.
Now,
however, the time has come to rethink Rosapenna.
Pat
Ruddy, Ireland’s leading contemporary golf
architect, has unveiled a soaring new links through the dunes that line this
majestic stretch of Atlantic coastline. Its debut follows the recent
resurrection and expansion of the Rosapenna Hotel. And suddenly the journey up
the narrow, winding road toward the outer reaches of Donegal is one that richly
rewards the savvy golfer.
Golf
was introduced at Rosapenna in 1891 by Robert Bermingham Clements, the Fourth
Earl of Leitrim, who invited Old Tom to lay out a pleasurable links in the
valley between the sandy beach, with its shallow, streaming whitecaps just
beyond, and the high dune ridge on the inland side. The course had to be placed
in these lowlands because Morris lacked the earthmoving technology necessary to
tackle higher ground.
By
the turn of the century Rosapenna was attracting a large contingent of
high-society golfers from England and Scotland. But
its grandeur began to fade with the advent of air travel and the building of
newer resorts. In 1962 the picturesque wood-frame hotel, with its gabled wings
flanking the main section and the balustraded veranda, burned to the
ground.
In
1980 Frank Casey, whose father was the head waiter and manager of the restaurant
at the old hotel, acquired the 800-acre property, which included the golf course
and a block of hotel rooms that had
been built in 1964.
Casey
contacted Ruddy in 1994 about building a course here, and work began in earnest
in 1996. The links that resulted is appropriately dubbed Sandy Hills, which is in many ways the ideal of
a modern links. Intended for the serious golfer, its narrow fairways appear
constricting from the tee, but the landing areas sculpted from the dunes are
deceptively wide.
Above
all, the appeal of Sandy Hills lies in its beautifully balanced
routing through the high dunes cloaked in marram grass. These sandhills bear a
striking resemblance to the ones near the Giant’s Causeway in
Northern
Ireland that form the spine of Royal Portrush,
Portstewart and Castlerock. Many of the holes feature elevated tees and greens,
with drives into natural bowls on the dune floor. Most of the holes run north
and south along the dune ridges, parallel to the front nine of the Old Tom
course below, and above Tramore, the large beach along Sheephaven Bay that caught the Scotsman’s attention
so long ago.
There
are no weak holes, but the best come at the stretch of Nos. 6–13, which romp
across the interior dunes. No. 6 is at the far southern end of the course, with
the drive over a crest that reveals a picture-postcard view of the sickle of
beach and bay with Muckish Mountain straight ahead. No. 7 is a
downhill par 3 to a sliver of green peeking from the dunes, and the 8th leads
inland, tumbling downhill and then rising toward the backdrop of Carrigart and
the Lough
Salt Mountains in the
distance.
The
10th heads back toward the sea through a secret valley in the dunes, with the
raised green framed by the gray peak of Muckish. No. 12 continues in the same
direction, coursing upward through the dunes, and the 13th, having reached the
higher ground, is a seamless band of smoother fairway that coils leftward toward
Mulroy
Bay.
No
doubt Old Tom would approve of what has become of this linksland that he so
keenly recognized more than a century ago.
