The Golf Course at Adare Manor

In 1995, Robert Trent Jones Sr. — then in his late eighties — built a parkland course on the Adare Manor estate that many regarded as the finest in Ireland. Two decades later the resort's owner, the financier J.P. McManus, decided it should be better still. He brought in Tom Fazio, Augusta National's consulting architect, with his senior associate Tom Marzolf; they kept Trent Jones's routing but rebuilt the course from the ground up between 2016 and 2018 — capping the entire site with more than 200,000 tonnes of sand, laying some 50 miles of drainage, and threading broadcast cabling around every hole. It reopened in 2018, and in September 2027 it will host the Ryder Cup — the first staged in the Republic of Ireland since the K Club in 2006.

The course plays to par 72 over 7,509 yards, with the River Maigue winding through the estate and into play on several holes. The closing par-5 18th — 585 yards, the Maigue curling along its entire left side — is built for a Sunday singles match: reachable in two for the brave, punishing for the greedy, and framed by the neo-Gothic silhouette of the manor behind the green. In 2022 Adare hosted the JP McManus Pro-Am, when much of the world's top ten previewed the ground the Ryder Cup will be decided on.

Access is the catch. Since the Fazio rebuild the course is open to Adare Manor resort guests only, a caddie or forecaddie is mandatory, and the green fee is the highest in Ireland. But for anyone staying at the five-star manor — a Victorian-Gothic house on an 840-acre estate in the village of Adare, one of the prettiest in the country — it is as complete a golf experience as Ireland offers.