Best in Every Country
The best golf courses in Northern Ireland
Portstewart's Strand course, one of four courses in Northern Ireland on our most recent World's 100 ranking, hosted the 2017 Irish Open, won by Jon Rahm.
Gary Lisbon
Despite its relatively small size, Northern Ireland logs four courses in the Golf Digest World’s 100 Greatest Courses ranking, including the No. 1 course, Royal County Down. Its second highest-ranked course, Royal Portrush, is considered by many to be its equal and is now entrenched in the Open Championship rota and will host the major again in 2025.
Much of the country’s coastal areas are rocky rather than links, but the ruggedness can make for exciting golf like at Ardglass where golfers hit shots over and around cliffs. Still, the best courses are on links, while several parkland courses around Belfast round out Northern Ireland’s top 10.
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Editor's Note: Our Best Courses in Northern Ireland ranking is part of Golf Digest's rollout of the Best Courses in Every Country. Check back over the next few weeks for more of our rankings of the best golf around the world.
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Gary Lisbon/Courtesy of the club
Though located on the Irish Sea adjacent to Belfast Lough, Royal Belfast is not a links course—it’s a parkland-style design on heavy soils that more closely resembles the golf of San Francisco with sloping terrain, towering hardwoods and fairways that run through gauntlets of bunkers that have recently been fine-tuned by British architects Tom Mackenzie and Martin Ebert. Believed to be the oldest club in Ireland with one of the game’s great clubhouses in a Victorian manor that dates to 1852, the course was laid out by Harry Colt, who managed to layer the holes in a variety of compass directions while running the ninth and 10th, two par 4s, along the shoreline.
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LC Lambrecht/Courtesy of the club
Castlerock Golf Club located on the Causeway coast in Northern Ireland boasts 27 holes of championship caliber golf. Located in the back of the clubhouse and tucked out of sight, the nine-hole Bann course designed by Billy Kane in the mid-1980s is protected from the Atlantic Ocean by lofty dunes. Signature holes at the Bann course include the 491-yard par-5 fifth, “Bannview,” which plays downhill to a green seemingly engulfed by sand dunes, as well as the short par-3 third, “Kelly’s Eye,” protected by the golf course's only bunker. The course is an hour from Belfast or 40 minutes from Derry, and is characterized by steep elevation changes, sharp doglegs and consistent windy conditions making this nine-hole “relief” course anything but.
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Courtesy of the club
8. Malone Golf Club
Belfast, Northern Ireland
This old club, founded in the 1890s, moved locations around Belfast numerous times before settling down in the early 1960s on their current property in the country south of the city. The design is a Mulligan’s stew of architectural input, from John Morrison (who worked with Harry Colt) to the firm of C.K. Cotton to a number of more recent names who have put various remodels and new holes on the course. It remains, fundamentally, a strong parkland layout full of mature trees and several holes that play along a lake at the center of the property, including the lovely par-3 15th where members hit over a cove of water.
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Courtesy of the club
Lough Erne Golf Course and Resort is located in Enniskillen, Northern Ireland, two hours from Belfast and almost three from Dublin. Host to a challenge match between Rory McIlroy and Padraig Harrington, the championship course at Lough Erne was designed by Nick Faldo in 2009 and sits on a stunning 600-acre peninsula straddled by Lough Erne and Castle Hume Lough. The course features water in-play on 11 holes as well as stark elevation changes that route players in and around the resort estate. The signature hole on the front nine is the par-4 second, a dogleg whose fairway runs alongside a water hazard before turning inland. The back nine is known for the challenging par-5 16th that plays down and through rolling hills and reveals panoramic views of the estate and lough. A mix of parkland and links-style golf, the Faldo course at Lough Erne offers the opportunity for players to relax and enjoy a gorgeous landscape while also giving them challenging championship level playing conditions.
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David Cannon
Located just up the road from Royal County Down, Ardglass’ first nine holes date to the 1890s—but it wasn’t until the 1970s that the second nine was built. That discrepancy in time explains why it sometimes feels like playing two different courses since many of the holes run along the rocky cliffs overlooking the Coney Island Bay and the Irish Sea, and others play away from the cliffs adjacent to farmland. The course has a number of memorable and scenic holes, including the first, a short par 4 that charges straight uphill along the ramparts, the par-3 second that plays over the cliffs, and the 18th that runs back the opposite direction to the foot of one of golf’s most unique clubhouses set inside the former Ardglass Castle that dates to the 1300s.
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Courtesy of the club
Though Scottish professional Ben Sayers was better known for his clubmaking and playing career, finishing runner-up and third in back-to-back years at The Open Championship (1888, 1889), he was also tasked with routing the course at Castlerock’s Mussenden course on the club’s newly acquired property. Then in 1930, while Harry Colt was reworking the Old Tom Morris design at Royal Portrush, it’s believed he stopped in at Castlerock to redesign the course. The resulting links has hosted highly regarded championships and remains one of Northern Ireland’s best courses.
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Mark Alexander
Tom Doak calls the Royal Portrush’s Valley course “the most underrated golf course in Ireland and the North.” That was before the fifth and sixth holes, out in the massive seaside dunes, were sacrificed to create the new seventh and eighth holes on the Dunluce course in 2015 for the 2019 Open Championship. To make up for the loss, Martin Ebert molded several new holes, including the par-3 15th, the par-3 17th and the par-4 18th that now brings the routing home closer to the clubhouse. What hasn’t changed is the sense of playing down between some of golf’s greatest sand hills and the debate about whether there’s a better one-two punch in links golf.
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Gary Lisbon
Although golf architect Willie Park Jr. did fiddle with a few holes in 1913, Portstewart’s Strand Course is mostly the result of amateur architects. A.W. Gow, the greenkeeper from nearby Portrush, staked out the original course by 1910. Eighty years later, math teacher Des Giffin, who was Portstewart’s green chairman, and Michael Moss, the club secretary, added seven new holes, the second through eighth, in dramatic dunes. Mike Stachura, Golf Digest’s longtime Senior Editor of Equipment and savvy course design buff, describes its dramatic setting: “The first tee at the Strand is set on high dunes, like you’re surveying the kingdom, with beach and waves down to your right and all of County Antrim in front. It’s no wonder the television series Game of Thrones used the nearby land as scene-stealers.”
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Mark Alexander
Portrush is still the only Irish course to host The Open. The Old Tom Morris design, reworked by H.S. Colt in the 1930s, was the Open site back in 1951, and was again in 2019, won by Irishman Shane Lowry. In preparation for that event, architect Martin Ebert added new seventh and eighth holes, fashioned from land on the club's Valley Course (ranked 82nd), to replace its weak 17th and 18th holes. That means the notorious Calamity Hole, an uphill 210-yard par 3, will now be the 16th instead of the 14th, and the old dogleg-right par-4 16th will now be the closing hole, with a new back tee. Ebert retained Colt's greens, considered one of the best set of putting surfaces in the world. The Dunluce course will host the Open again in 2025.
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Nick Wall
On a clear spring day, with Dundrum Bay to the east, the Mountains of Mourne to the south and gorse-covered dunes in golden bloom, there is no lovelier place in golf. The design is attributed to Old Tom Morris but was refined by half a dozen architects in the past 120 years, most recently by Donald Steel. Though the greens are surprisingly flat, as if to compensate for the rugged terrain and numerous blind shots, bunkers are a definite highlight, most with arched eyebrows of dense marram grasses and impenetrable clumps of heather.
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