For sixty-eight years, Royal Portrush was the Open Championship venue that existed mostly in the imagination of people who had read about it. It hosted the Championship once, in 1951, when Max Faulkner won on a course few outside Ireland had seen and fewer still had played, and then the Open simply stopped coming. Not because Portrush had done anything wrong. The Troubles made Northern Ireland an impossible logistical proposition for decades, and by the time peace made a return conceivable, the R&A had built a rota around courses that had never left it. When the Open finally came back in 2019, Shane Lowry won it in front of the largest crowds outside St Andrews in the Championship’s history, and Royal Portrush went from forgotten to essential in the space of four days.
A Harry Colt links with new holes hiding in plain sight
The Dunluce Links, Portrush’s championship course, takes its name from the ruined castle that sits on the cliffs a mile up the coast, visible from several holes and doing more for the course’s postcard appeal than any bunker ever could. Harry Colt reshaped the layout in 1932, routing it through a triangle of duneland with the Atlantic on one side and the hills of Donegal visible on a clear day across the water, and his version of Portrush held for the better part of a century with only minor tinkering.
The course that hosted the 2019 Open was not quite the one Colt left behind. Architect Martin Ebert, tasked with finding room for grandstands, hospitality and the infrastructure a modern major demands, replaced the old 17th and 18th holes entirely, building two new ones, the 7th and 8th, on land borrowed from Portrush’s second course, the Valley Links. It is a rare thing in golf architecture for a redesign of a course this good to be judged an improvement rather than a compromise, but the new holes at Portrush have been treated as such by nearly everyone who has played them, slotting into Colt’s routing as though they had always been there.
Calamity Corner and the rest of a properly testing back nine
No hole at Portrush is discussed more than the 16th, a long par 3 known as Calamity Corner, where the green sits on a shelf above a deep chasm that swallows anything pushed right and leaves a recovery shot good players would rather not attempt twice. It earns its name. But Calamity is not really the outlier at Portrush that its reputation suggests, because the course spends its closing stretch asking similarly serious questions without raising its voice about any of them. The 14th, Purgatory, plays along a ridge with trouble down the left the entire way. The 5th, White Rocks, doglegs along the top of the dunes with the sea and the rocks it is named for visible below the fairway, one of the most photographed tee shots in the sport and, unusually for a hole that pretty, also one of the fairer.
What separates Portrush from some of its rota neighbours is that it rarely feels like it is trying to trick anyone. The fairways are generous by championship standards, the trouble is visible rather than hidden, and the course leans on genuine shot-making and nerve rather than blind bunkers or unplayable rough to defend itself. That is part of why it produced a playoff-free runaway in 2019 and a similarly clean result when the Open returned again in 2025, Scottie Scheffler closing it out four clear of Harris English to become the tournament’s most recent champion.
Getting there, and why it is worth the trip
Portrush the town sits on the Causeway Coast, close enough to the Giant’s Causeway that most visiting golfers build a full day around both, and the club still operates as a genuine members’ club with a waiting list rather than a corporate showpiece, which shows in small ways once you are through the front door. Green fees on the Dunluce Links run at the upper end of what links golf costs anywhere in the British Isles, roughly in line with Portmarnock or Lahinch rather than the more accessible end of the Irish and Scottish coast, and tee times in the height of summer need booking the better part of a year out. The Valley Links next door, cheaper and less garlanded, is a perfectly good way to spend an afternoon if the Dunluce is full, though nobody pretends it is the reason people fly to Antrim. After sixty-eight years in the wilderness, Portrush has spent the last seven making up for lost time, and it shows no sign of slowing down.