As Royal Portrush golf club sneaks into view from around a curve in the County Antrim coast road, the sight is unforgettable. Emerald green fairways glimpsed between shaggy-topped sand dunes, the great headland of Inishowen contrasting vividly with the low line of the Skerries and the sea beyond.
Portrush is home to one of the most glorious stretches of links land in all of Ireland. Along with Portstewart, Castlerock and Ballycastle, it comprises one of four of the most natural courses you're ever likely to find almost shoulder to shoulder - a necklace of golf's finest gems.
But it's not only classic courses that reign supreme here. Steeped in myth and legend, inhabited by giants, ghosts and banshees wailing through the sea mist, the Causeway Coast is one of the most dramatic in the British Isles and home to the spectacular Giant’s Causeway as well as legendary Irish hospitality.
“Fire away lads,” says the starter as I study the course guide and nervously draw a 3-wood from the bag. Royal Portrush throws down the gauntlet from the first tee of the famed Dunluce course. Established in May 1888 and included in every list of the world’s top 100, the Dunluce has long been regarded as one of the greatest tests of a golfer’s skill. Had it been more suitable in other respects for staging a modern Open Championship, it would certainly have held more than the one in 1951, when the eccentric Max Faulkner lifted Claret Jug.
More recently it has found further fame as the course adjacent to where Graeme McDowell lives and learned his golf on the way to US Open glory and Ryder Cup immortality. Darren Clarke, too, earned his plus four handicap here as an amateur.
This is the seaside links form of the game at its very best - blind shots, deep pot bunkers, fast-running fairways, lightning fast greens, strong winds and that unmistakable taste of salt in the sea air. Not for the faint-hearted.
But one hole among many great ones will etch itself in your memory. At 210-yard, the par-3 14th is known as Calamity and demands accuracy from either long iron or hybrid that must not leak right, down and down on a slope to hell. By comparison the par-4 that follows (named Pergatory) is a pussy cat.
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