Mullingar Golf Club

Robert Rochfort, 1st Earl of Belvedere, built his hunting lodge at Belvedere in 1740 from designs by Richard Castle — the German-born architect responsible for Leinster House, Powerscourt, and Westport House. The Earl became known as "the Wicked Earl" for what he did next. In 1743 he accused his wife Mary Molesworth, whom he had married when she was sixteen, of adultery with his own brother. He confined her to Gaulstown under permanent house arrest for thirty-one years, until his death in 1774. She emerged "an old and scared woman who had lost everything." While she was imprisoned, Rochfort built what is known as the Jealous Wall at Belvedere in around 1760: a colossal Gothic sham ruin, 55 metres wide, constructed of rubble limestone to permanently block his view of the larger house his brother George had built next door. It is Ireland's largest folly and still stands on the estate grounds.

The golf club was founded in 1894 and spent four decades moving between sites before securing a lease of land adjacent to Belvedere from Colonel Howard-Bury in 1934. James Braid — five-time Open Champion and the architect responsible for more than 200 courses across Britain and Ireland — designed the layout, reportedly in a single day, for a fee of £21 plus travelling expenses. He is said to have called it "one of his very best efforts." The course opened in 1937, expanded and renovated carefully across the decades, with a significant update by David Jones in 2003–05 that added USGA-standard greens while preserving Braid's routing. It plays 6,685 yards at par 72: mature, tree-lined, tighter than the yardage suggests, with exceptional conditioning year-round.

The Mullingar Scratch Trophy, inaugurated in 1963 by Joe Carr and now in its sixth decade, is Ireland's leading 72-hole amateur strokeplay event. Past winners include Rory McIlroy (2006), Pádraig Harrington, Paul McGinley, Darren Clarke, and Shane Lowry — virtually every significant Irish amateur of the past sixty years. Christy O'Connor Snr won the Irish Professional Championship here in 1965 in a three-way playoff and called the course's 2nd hole, a par-3 of 209 yards from an elevated tee to an elevated green, "the best inland par 3 in Ireland." It is still unchanged.

Joe Dolan — Mullingar's most celebrated native, the only Irish singer to reach number one in four consecutive decades, and a keen golfer who played regularly at this club — died on 26 December 2007. His statue stands in Market Square. Lough Derravaragh, five kilometres north, is the lake where the Children of Lir were condemned to 900 years as swans in the oldest surviving story in Irish mythology.