More than 50 courses have sprouted in Ireland since
1990, and nearly all of them offer a warm welcome to traveling
golfers. Two of
the newest and most impressive are at Carton House,
14 miles west of Dublin
Airport in the town of Maynooth. Within the
stone walls of an 1,100-acre
estate that was the ancestral home of
the Fitzgeralds, Earls of Kildare, are
two courses, one a parkland
layout by Mark O'Meara that weaves through
specimen trees
and alongside several ponds and streams. Holes 13 through
15, two
par 3s sandwiching an heroic par 5, are just as fetching and almost as
demanding a stretch as Augusta's Amen Corner. The other course, the
one that's
getting most of the attention, is by Colin Montgomerie. It's an
exposed, low-lying,
links-type layout, lined with tall grass and
hungry bunkers. The Irish Golf Union will
soon make its home at Carton House, and once
the old manor and
attendant lodges are fully outfitted, this place will
probably
become golf destination No. 1 in greater Dublin. But surely the
course in the Dublin area that has assumed the highest profile is
the one by
Arnold Palmer and Ed
Seay at
the Kildare Hotel & Country Club, known worldwide as the K Club,
site of the 2006 Ryder Cup.
To put it bluntly, this was
the most
disappointing course on my visit and one of the most
overrated I've ever
played. If you're seeking a true
Irish experience, don't bother to play the K
Club. It's Florida
golf—think Doral on drugs—with water everywhere along with
a series
of intentionally obscured tee shots, hard-to-decipher doglegs and
repelling greens. How Darren Clarke managed to shoot 60 there in the
1999
Irish Open I'll never fathom—I had 60 by about the 11th hole.
Let's just say
the K course was a strikeout with me.
But the rest of
the place was a
knockout. The accommodations at Straffan House,
around which the Palmer
course plays, were impeccable in
all respects, as befits Ireland's only AA
Five Red Star hotel. The
hot bath, superb meal and bottle of wine were just
what I needed
after the ego-bruising I'd suffered. And to be fair there's a
second, kinder/gentler course on the property.Subsequent stays
at
Rathsallagh House, Adare Manor, Ashford Castle and Dromoland
Castle affirmed
that Ireland can match any destination in the world
for first-class lodging,
food and service. All four of
those establishments have fine parkland courses
on their grounds,
the two best being Adare, where in 1995 the late Robert
Trent Jones
crafted the last of his more than 400 designs; and Dromoland,
where
Ron Kirby and Joe Carr just completed a masterful reconfiguration.
Taken together with Jack Nicklaus' Mount Juliet; the three lakeside
classics down south at the Killarney Golf Club; and—the best of them
all—Druids Glen by Pat Ruddy and Tom Craddock, there's a compelling
case for the supremacy of
Ireland in parkland golf. In reply,
Scotland has only the courses at Gleneagles, Blairgowrie and
the super-private Loch Lomond.
But winning
that battle is like
winning the JV scrimmage, so let's get to the main event:
the grand
and glorious links courses we Americans cross the Atlantic to
play.
