County Sligo (Championship)

There are many spectacular golf courses in Ireland and County Sligo is no exception. The views of the Darty Mountains and Benbulben, Sligo’s limestone “Table Mountain”, are simply beautiful. Drumcliffe Bay sweeps around the golf course. Its fine long sandy beaches, the Atlantic and the harbour are often in full panoramic view. The Ox Mountains – Knockalong the highest peak – add a further dimension to the already stunning vista.

In the same vein as the scenery, County Sligo is a real joy. It’s a strategic links with dramatic undulations, raised plateau greens, run-offs, high ground, low ground, and cliffs, challenging bunkering, burns and dunes. County Sligo has it all, including unusual routing over three distinctly different sections. The back nine, especially the 11th to the 17th, played on the headland, are truly magnificent. The sheer individuality of holes and the varied terrain makes County Sligo an absolute must-play golf course.

County Sligo is the home of the West of Ireland Amateur Championship and host to other important amateur events. It was here, in 1981, that Declan Branigan won the Irish Amateur Close Championship, becoming the first Irishman to win three major Irish amateur titles in the same year. Earlier that year, Branigan won the West (also at County Sligo) and the East (at County Louth).

In Pat Ruddy’s book Holes in my Head: A Lifetime Dreaming Golf Holes , the author has this to say about the recent course renovations in the following edited extract:

“To say I was pleased to be invited to work on the County Sligo Golf Club’s great links would be an understatement. I was thrilled and ecstatic to return on such a mission, at the end of a long journey in the game, to the place where my golf life started. It was at Rosses Point that I fell seriously in love with golf. It was in the 1950s. I was but a boy. Ever since, as boy and man, I have dreamt of Rosses Point every day. Every day.

It was here that the seeds were sown for a career in golf course architecture. I was told that the links had been designed by a great man named Harry Colt in 1927. That seemed like ages ago but he became much more immediate when I realised he had died as recently as 1951. Our lives had overlapped. Imagine my shock and delight in 2013 when David O’Donovan, manager of the County Sligo Golf Club, asked me whether I might be interested in making a submission on possible improvements to their great links.

I have striven to enhance a great place in a gentle way as I resisted any thoughts of a ‘vanity run’ of huge landshapes and cascading modern greens. I just slipped into an armchair beside Mr. Colt and listened to his thoughts. I am confident that the place is left recognisable as before, but much different and better. With this in mind I set to work at Sligo and headlined my plan of works on the links as: Revitalising a Classic. The first thing to do was to chart the existing greens in detail. In this way the club has a detailed record of the greens as I found them and as I intended to leave them.

Also, the game would be strengthened greatly with new championship tees at holes 1, 5, 8, 10, 11, 14, 15 and 17. These tees were planned for extra distance but also for extra strategy as many of the holes had come to be played in a straight line from tee to green and I took great care to create new angles with a number of the new tees. The game has been greatly improved for championship play with new green extensions presenting the opportunity to place the target behind or close to bunkers and run-offs.

In several cases I took the opportunity to have bunkers that arrived with the green extensions move into position to add character to the old untouched greens as well. There are now places where a previously innocent pin at the back of the old green is dangerously close to a new bunker. It was my opinion that the four par-3s at Rosses Point are excellent and there is no imperative to change them. Things could be done. But there is hardly a better quartet of par-3s on any course and so they stay.

The three par-5s were a different matter as they had developed a silly habit of yielding too many birdies (a classical par-5 disease) and lots of eagles. The 3rd is a handsome devil playing downhill but at 533-yards to an open green it was an easy target. My solution was to create a new, well-bunkered green further back and left. The 5th was even more vulnerable at 480-yards but it moved to a new level with a new tee and a long extension at the back of the green. The 12th is an iconic hole and work there has featured strong bunkering in the dog-leg from the tee and a new greenside bunker.

I hope that my work meets with the approval of Harry Colt. I left his routing alone and most of his greens as I paid tribute to history while helping a great links adjust to the modern championship game. The great links is still recognisable, all in character, but so much more intricate and better.”