County Louth Golf Club (Baltray)

County Louth Golf Club — known to everyone as Baltray, after the village beside it — was founded in 1892 on the dunes where the River Boyne meets the Irish Sea, three miles east of Drogheda. In 1938 the great English architect Tom Simpson, working with the amateur champion Molly Gourlay, reworked the links so successfully that the layout has barely changed since. It is ranked, year in and year out, among the finest links courses in Ireland — and among the purest tests of the form anywhere.

The course plays to par 72 over 7,031 yards through rolling duneland, defended less by length than by subtle greens, clever bunkering and the wind off the estuary. Simpson's routing is full of quietly brilliant holes; the short par-4 14th — drivable, yet treacherous — is the one most often singled out. Baltray has hosted the East of Ireland Amateur Open Championship every year since 1941, one of the cornerstones of the Irish amateur calendar.

In 2009 a 22-year-old amateur named Shane Lowry shot a third-round 62 here and went on to win the Irish Open in a playoff, turning professional the week after. The club sits in the Boyne Valley, with Newgrange, Mellifont Abbey and the Battle of the Boyne site all a short drive away, and Dublin Airport just 45 minutes south. It is the most accomplished links on the east coast outside the Dublin city courses — and far less heralded than it deserves to be.