A golf weekend in the West

Everyone plans the Kerry trip. Far fewer make it to the northwest, which is their loss and your gain: around Sligo and north Mayo there is a run of magnificent, natural links, with the flat-topped mountain of Benbulben watching over them, at green fees a good bit below the marquee names. This is Yeats country — the poet is buried at Drumcliffe “under bare Ben Bulben's head,” a few minutes from the first tee at Rosses Point — and the whole weekend has a wilder, quieter, better-value feel than the south.

County Sligo (Rosses Point) is the headline — a Harry Colt links laid out on high ground above the Atlantic with Benbulben filling the sky behind it, and the long-running home of the West of Ireland Championship. It is a big, rolling, exposed course; catch it in a breeze and it will test everything.

Then get to Enniscrone, forty minutes down the coast in Mayo — an Eddie Hackett links through a genuinely enormous dune field that a lot of good judges rate above its more famous neighbour, and for less money. Between the two you have as good a pair of value links as exists anywhere in Ireland.

Right beside the surf village of Strandhill, Strandhill is a quirky, up-and-down links squeezed between the dunes and Knocknarea mountain — not long, not manicured, and all the more fun for it, especially for an afternoon or twilight round.

If you have the appetite for a proper drive, Carne, out on the remote Mullet Peninsula, is the last course the great Eddie Hackett designed and one of the wildest links on earth — vast, shaggy dunes at the very edge of Europe, with barely a bulldozer mark on it. It is a long way from anywhere, and that is entirely the point.

Sligo town is the sensible base — central, twenty minutes from Rosses Point, with a food and music scene that has come on hugely. Browse hotels in Sligo, or if you are prioritising the Mayo courses, Westport — one of the prettiest towns in Ireland, beneath Croagh Patrick, with its own decent parkland course to boot. See our Sligo and Wild Atlantic Way guides for more, or let the planner sort the driving for you.