LAND OF HEART’S DESIRE
A magnificent setting and some wonderfully testing holes make Enniscrone a course every golfer should experience. By Brian Keogh
HOME is where the heart is for golfers, the prospect of a return visit to the site of one of your most memorable wins is something that never loses its allure.
It says it all about the charms of Enniscrone in the wild west of Ireland that Finland’s Mikko Ilonen still speaks fondly of the great links by Killala Bay and insists he’d love to return some day soon to relive his 1999 West of Ireland Championship victory.
Perhaps next year, when Enniscrone celebrates the centenary of its founding, he will find the time to accept a longstanding invitation and stop off at the lovely Co Sligo links before heading north to Ballyliffin for the Irish Open in Co Donegal.
It’s a title Ilonen won at Fota Island in 2014 and when recalling his win over Rory Leonard in the “West” 15 years earlier, his fondness for the now lovingly redesigned Enniscrone links was more than evident.
“I’ve always said that I would like to go back there one day just for the memories that I have from the place,” Ilonen said recalling his win in the last of three successive Wests held there from 1997 to 1999.
“I think it was ’99 when I won there and a friend back home strongly believed that the juniors and amateurs back then needed to learn links golf, and he took us to the West and we played some links golf, and I won the West.
“And I won the Amateur, which really kickstarted my career. That’s why I’m here. Without those wins, I wouldn’t be here.”
Like many West of Ireland champions, Ilonen’s memories are coloured by the vagaries of the Irish weather at Easter.
“We teed off early in the morning in qualifying and by the time we got to the green, we couldn’t see the balls because it was snowing,” he recounted after his Irish Open win.
“We don’t play golf in the winter. You do!”
It’s not the weather but the stunning quality of the links that’s made Enniscrone a must-play venue.
Indeed, the Finn’s journey to the top echelons of the professional game is prosaic compared to Enniscrone’s development from very humble beginnings in 1918 to the 27-hole complex that draws visitors from all over the world today.
Before the club called in the prolific Irish designer Eddie Hackett to extend the course to 18 holes in the 1960s, it boasted just 25 members. In fact, in 1959 there were just 14 souls paying their dues,
The club scrimped and saved and Hackett, who was notoriously generous in his dealings with rural Irish clubs, refashioned some of the old nine and developed a new nine in the dunes for a total budget of just £4,000.
It was not until 1974, five years after this shoestring project began, that the new course finally opened to the public. But while it was a true jewel in the eyes of the members, it remained largely unknown until they took a punt and invested in a new clubhouse in the late 1990s.
It proved to be a masterstroke and in 1997 the club hosted the Irish Women’s Close and the first of those three West of Ireland Championships.
Visitor numbers grew year on year and the club took another giant leap in the early 2000s when Donald Steel and Martin Ebert were called in to redesign the course.
Now known as The Dunes course, Hackett’s 18-hole design layout was reconfigured to include six new holes in the seaside dunes, relegating several of Hackett’s less challenging holes to the Scurmore nine that sits alongside the main course for those of a less adventurous disposition.
The first hole, Hackett’s old 16th, runs past the front of the clubhouse, curving gently to the right towards a green set in a corridor of high dunes.
It’s considered by many to be one of the toughest opening holes in Irish golf and is quickly followed by three of the new Steel holes before it’s your turn to enjoy a run of sublime Hackett holes from the fifth to the 13th, where there is a great view from the tee of the ocean.
From there it’s back to Steel to play three gems — the Valley of Diamonds, The Strand and The Long Bank — all three considered dazzling additions to a unique piece of linksland.
“The structure of the dunes was there and we tried to interfere as little as possible,” Steel said in the book, ‘Links of Heaven’. “I’d never seen linksland like that. And you want to do something that is worthy of the task.”
If there’s a word that sums up the result of this improbable result of the Hackett-Steel partnership, it’s “fun”.
While it can be a fearsome test from the championship tees, proper management of the rough means it’s more than playable for the aficionado keen to enjoy the beauty of the landscape, the views of Killala Bay, the River Moy and Nephin mountain as you wend your way between the high dunes in those ever-present Atlantic breezes.
It’s a breathtaking experience and one which will be enjoyed by the cream of Irish golf next year when it hosts the Irish Seniors and Irish Women’s Close Championships to mark the club’s 100th
anniversary.
Visitors are always welcome and with several fine hotels and restaurants in the village and a sensational beach on its doorstep, there are few better golfing getaways.
“The recession hit us quite badly but we never stopped investing in the course,” said long-standing member Albie O’Connor, a former Captain and Treasurer of the club
“But like many clubs, the challenge is to get more members.”
Ranked the 14th best club in Ireland by Golf Digest Ireland behind the legendary names of Irish golf, Enniscrone’s reputation continues to grow.
If the membership grows at the same rate, the future looks very bright indeed.
It remains most welcoming of visitors and offers attractive distance and overseas membership packages.
No excuse is needed to make the trip to one of Ireland’s great venues, and there might be no better occasion to see the club in all its glory than by paying the modest €35 visitor’s entrance fee to play the sixth annual Charlie McGoldrick Cup on August 18.
Celebrated in memory of the club’s much loved PGA professional of 21 years, who passed away after a battle with cancer at the age of 51 in 2011, the event’s popularity says much about the spirit of the club.
“Charlie was a brilliant teacher of the game,” Enniscrone stalwart Séamus Duffy said. “He always honed in on the positive, and you would leave him after a lesson believing that you were ready to play the best golf of your life!”
Charlie may no longer be around, but it’s hard to disagree with his assertion that Enniscrone is “not only one of the best golf courses in Ireland, but one of the best golf