Tralee Golf Club

Turns out he was simply happy to be out on this rollicking Arnold Palmer layout that sits atop a rugged swath of Ireland’s southwest coast. “That was Chuckie,” says Palmer Course Design VP Harrison Minchew, immediately recognizing my one-man gallery when I related the story. “He had a stroke and can’t get around as well anymore, so the members gave him a cart. He goes out and rides the course almost every day.”

Clearly, Tralee people love their golf. Ed Seay, Palmer’s long-time design partner, recalls working on the beachside par-3 16th hole on a frigid day. “We had to hide in a concave sand dune for about 40 minutes,” Seay says. “It was raining and blowing so hard, little ice chips blistered my eyes behind my sunglasses. The captain told me, ‘We’d be playing today if the golf course were finished.’”

That resolute spirit helped Tralee’s membership secure this wondrous slice of linksland eight miles northwest of Tralee proper. The present location, on a rocky peninsula known as Barrow, is the club’s fourth site 1896, each of the previous in-town tracts having been plagued by rainfall and poorly draining soil.

Not so the Barrow property. The front side is an open and wind-whipped expanse that loops along Tralee Bay, across which are sublime views of the Dingle Peninsula and the Slieve Mish Mountains. The inward half treks through a violently rising and tumbling dunescape that’s rife with constricted fairways, plateau greens and steep falloffs into chasms of thick, Titleist-gobbling grasses.

The holes are thrilling, to be sure, and have often been likened to Palmer’s own swashbuckling style of play. But Tralee has long owned a reputation for being too harsh—concerns that have been addressed with piecemeal “softening” renovations over the past several years, a project that’s finally set for completion this spring.