It’s a rare week in professional golf when the golf course is the star. Royal County Down, on rugged, windblown topography along the Irish Sea and beneath the Mountains of Mourne, hosts the 2024 Amgen Irish Open this week on the DP World Tour.
Unlike most weeks where tournament venues often border on boring, Royal County Down is anything but—with blind shots and an unorthodox routing with unquestioned architectural merits. It has ranked as the No. 1 course on Golf Digest’s World’s 100 Greatest ranking in each edition in the past decade, even topping our combined U.S. and international ranking in 2016-2017.
Royal County Down – David Cannon
Tour pros crave predictability: point-and-shoot golf where they know with certainty how the ball will react. That’s what makes links golf is so great—it removes predictability. Royal County Down’s challenge comes from all angles—with snarling bunkers edged by marram grass and shocking elevation changes where you never know where a ball will come to rest.
This is only the second time since 1935 that Royal County Down has hosted the Irish Open (the European Tour also visited the Northern Ireland venue in 2015), and other than a few Senior Open Championships, the only other time Royal County Down would’ve been seen was the 2007 Walker Cup, when coverage of the amateur matches was scarce.
Just like Pine Valley, the No. 1 course in the U.S., Royal County Down had a litany of great golf minds work on it over the years. Old Tom Morris transformed nine holes that were designed by a schoolteacher into an 18-hole course, then some great players had their input over the next few decades, including James Braid, J.H. Taylor and Harry Vardon. Famed architect H.S. Colt created the fourth and ninth holes in 1925, and across the late ‘90s into the 2000s, Donald Steel made significant modernizations, including creating a new short par-4 16th hole and bolstering 17 and 18.
It will be fun to see how Royal County Down plays this week. With some wet and windy conditions in 2015, 2-under was the winning score with Soren Kjeldsen edging Eddie Pepperell and Bernd Wiesberger. Of course, technology has advanced quite a bit, so without the absence of wind and rain, we’ll see how well the course holds up.
Main Image: Stephen Szurlej
