Thurles Golf Club

At 3pm on Saturday, 1 November 1884, in the billiards room of Hayes' Commercial Hotel in Thurles, Michael Cusack and Maurice Davin — along with six other men — founded the Gaelic Athletic Association. The founding meeting was modest; the outcome was one of the most consequential cultural acts in modern Irish history. The GAA, with its ban on foreign games and its insistence on preserving hurling and Gaelic football as the people's games, became the organisational backbone of Irish nationalist identity through the revolutionary period and beyond. Hayes' Hotel still trades in the town.

Thurles (Durlas Éile Uí Fhogartaigh — "O'Fogarty's Strong Fort") is the town Tipperary hurling is built around. Semple Stadium, named for Tom Semple who won All-Ireland medals in 1900, 1906, and 1908, is the second-largest GAA stadium in Ireland. The Cathedral of the Assumption was designed by J.J. McCarthy and modelled on Pisa Cathedral, begun under Archbishop Patrick Leahy in 1865 and consecrated by Archbishop Thomas Croke in 1879 — the same Croke for whom Croke Park in Dublin is named. The ground the cathedral sits on has had a church since the early 14th century.

The golf club was founded in 1909 and played several sites before purchasing Turtulla House and its 218 acres in February 1944 for £6,100. The estate had history of its own: in early 1843, Daniel O'Connell visited the house during his Repeal Campaign and addressed a monster meeting at the Hill of Knockroe, less than a mile from what is now the 18th fairway. The original 18-hole layout was designed by a Mr J. McAllister for a fee of £5 plus expenses. In 2006–07, Mel Flanagan redesigned the outward nine entirely — four water features with natural stone bridges, weaving the River Suir into play — while leaving the acclaimed inward nine untouched. The back nine, with its deep bunkers and subtle routing through mature timber, is regularly described as among the finest nine holes of inland golf in Ireland. The 11th, a par-3 of 212 yards known as "Jack's House," is singled out most often. The ninth plays the length of the river bank to a narrow, left-sloping green.