The course rankings that the magazines publish every other year do not usually settle on a single answer for very long. Augusta moves up and down. Pine Valley and Cypress Point swap positions depending on which list you read. The Old Course will always be top three on most British lists and not always top five on most American ones. There is, however, one course that has spent the last three decades sitting at, or one place off, the top of nearly every list the game has produced, and most of the people reading the list have never played it. Royal County Down, on the eastern coast of Northern Ireland, in the town of Newcastle, under a set of mountains that look, on a clear day, as if they were placed there for the express purpose of being a backdrop for a golf course, is the course that the rankings have been quietly settling on. It has not hosted a men’s major. It has hosted two Irish Opens in the last fifteen years. Most American visitors will go their entire golfing lives without playing it. The course continues, in the absence of any obvious reason it should be ranked above more famous properties, to sit at the top of nearly every credible list.
The walk down the first fairway tells most of the story before the round has properly begun. The tee is elevated. The fairway runs out towards the sea. The Mountains of Mourne, the range Percy French wrote a song about and that the Northern Ireland Tourist Board has put on the cover of every brochure since, sit immediately to the right of the green complex and dominate every shot from the first hole through to the ninth. The composition of the landscape, before the player has hit a single shot, is the part of the experience that the photographs only partly convey. The course is not laid out to use the mountains as scenery. It is laid out so that, at certain moments on certain holes, the player has to choose a line directly at them. The visual line that the player chooses on the second tee, on the fourth tee, on the ninth tee, is a line that does not exist on any other golf course in the world.
The design
The course was originally laid out by Old Tom Morris in 1889 for the modest sum of four guineas, which the club is fond of pointing out was almost certainly less than they paid for the lunch he ate while he was visiting. Harry Vardon redesigned several holes in 1908. Donald Steel did the most recent of the gentle modernisations in the 1990s. The structure of the course, however, is essentially what Morris left behind. It is two loops of nine that do not quite mirror each other, separated by a clubhouse that sits on a small rise and looks out at a property which, from the back patio, appears to be more sand than grass.
The defining feature of the design is the blind tee shot. Royal County Down has, depending on how you count them, between five and seven completely blind drives. The fairway, from the tee, is hidden by a dune. The player is asked to aim at a marker post that has been placed at the top of the dune by the greenkeeping staff. The line over the marker post will, if the swing is good, find the fairway. The line over the marker post is also the line that most modern visitors will second-guess for the first half of the round. The course is not asking the player to hit a good shot at a hazard they can see. It is asking the player to commit to a good shot at a fairway they have to take on faith. The shift in attention required is the part of the round that most visiting golfers, on a first round at the course, find hardest to make.
The bunkers
The bunkers at Royal County Down are the most photographed feature of the course, and the part of the design that most often produces a sentence in a Tour player’s interview that ends with the words “I have never seen anything like it.” They are revetted. They are deep. They are fringed with marram grass, the long bearded fescue that grows on the seaward face of the dune, which gives the bunker a look that the photographs make appear faintly menacing and which the player on the ground discovers is faintly menacing for exactly the reason it looks that way. A ball that finds the lip of one of these bunkers cannot be played forward. It can sometimes not be played at all. The recovery shot, if there is one, is sideways, backwards, or up and over a face that is, on several of the more famous bunkers, taller than the player.
The famous bunkers at the fourth, the eighth and the ninth are the ones that the magazines photograph. They are not the bunkers that lose the round. The bunkers that lose the round are the ones, on the second, the seventh and the fifteenth, which sit thirty yards short of a green that, from a hundred and fifty yards back, looks as if it is two clubs closer than the yardage book says. The player who clubs down on the approach because the green looks closer than it is will, more often than not, finish in a bunker that does not appear on any of the postcards.
What the course asks
The shared description, from the small number of touring professionals who have played the course in tournament conditions, is that Royal County Down is the closest thing in modern professional golf to playing a course in the way the players of the 1920s would have understood it. The wind comes in off the Irish Sea and does what it likes. The blind tee shots ask the player to trust the line. The greens, which are firm in summer to a degree that the Tour player accustomed to American conditions will not have prepared for, ask the player to land the approach short of the flag and let the ground do the rest. There is no point in trying to spin a wedge to a back pin. The ball will not stay. The shot the course rewards is the shot that the player who grew up on links land has been making since they were ten years old. It is not the shot that the modern Tour has made into a default.
The Irish Open in 2015 and again in 2024 produced two leaderboards that the touring professional with a high, controlled high spinning short iron found themselves unable to defend. Both weeks were won by players who had grown up on this kind of course. Rory McIlroy missed the cut in 2015 at his home Open. The course produced, in the wind that arrived on Friday afternoon, exactly the kind of round that a player from the modern game’s most cosseted parts cannot easily put together. The course did not get easier on the weekend. It got harder, and the winner was a player who had not been on the favourites list at the start of the week.
Why it stays at the top of the lists
The reason Royal County Down keeps appearing at the top of the rankings is not, in the end, about the design. The design is excellent. There are also half a dozen courses on the British and Irish coasts whose design is, by the standards of architectural criticism, at least as strong. What separates Royal County Down from the other contenders is the property the course occupies. The land is the most dramatic linksland the game has produced. The dunes are taller and tighter than they are anywhere else. The view from the high tees is the view that most visitors describe afterwards as the moment they understood, finally, what the original Scottish and Irish links courses were trying to be. The course, in a way that few other properties manage, has not been improved out of its identity. The members continue to play it the way it was built to be played. The visitor, who has flown in from somewhere else to see what the rankings have been pointing at, walks off the eighteenth with the sense of having played a course that has not been polished for the camera.
The course will not host a men’s major. The Royal and Ancient has long preferred Portrush for that purpose, partly for logistics, partly because Portrush is the more obviously suitable championship venue. Royal County Down will continue to host the Irish Open every few years and the Walker Cup occasionally, and will continue to sit at or near the top of every credible course ranking. The visitor who manages, eventually, to get a tee time will understand within the first three holes why the lists keep settling there. The course does not look like the others. It does not play like the others. The members, when asked, will tell anyone who is listening that the rankings have it about right.