Lahinch Golf Club Old Course Review - Vast sand hills swathed in knee-high rough, quick greens with perplexing run-offs and a superb variety of holes, Lahinch delivers rugged seaside golf in a pure form
Lahinch Golf Club Old Course Review
Green Fee Range: €50-€190
Medal Tee: Par 72 – 6,613 Yards
Visitor Times: Every day, check with club for details
Website: www.lahinchgolf.com
Significant Changes
- Development of a Short Game Academy located close to the first tee box on the Old Army Barracks site. This facility opened in August 2016 and includes a short game range; chipping green complex; bunker practice area and practice nets. Members and visitors are welcome to use this facility free of charge
- A pedestrian crossing was installed to provide safe passage across the Liscannor Road
- The Dell green complex was re-turfed which facilitated the opportunity to address areas where surface ponding occurred and to re-introduce the option for golfers to use the lower part of both dunes which was a feature of the hole for many years
- Development of 5th hole tee box complex (extended; re-graded and turfed)
- Development of 6th hole tee box complex (realigned; extended; re-graded and turfed) and turfing of adjacent pathways
- Bunker development programme completed. This work addressed concerns with entering/exiting bunkers; consistency of sand and general aesthetics of the bunkers
- Ongoing development of grass species on both golf courses to promote finer grasses such as fescue
Lahinch Golf Club Old Course Review
Those who first commissioned Lahinch chose this plot of County Clare linksland over another 20 miles south, where Greg Norman’s 21st-century Doonbeg now stands, which should give you some idea as to the stunning nature of the terrain upon which Old Tom Morris was asked to weave his design magic in 1894.
Morris described it as being, “as fine a natural course as it has ever been my good fortune to play over”, and few who have visited this west Ireland classic would disagree, despite several changes over the years, most notably from Dr Alister MacKenzie, and more recently Martin Hawtree in 1999.
Hawtree’s brief was to reinstate some of the MacKenzie features lost in the 1930s, and today’s visitors should be delighted that the links now features the best of both Morris’ and MacKenzie’s design worlds, along with more recent sympathetic refinements.
The layout plays over wonderfully rumpled links terrain where the Inagh River meets the Atlantic, weaving between, and sometimes over, sizeable dunes.
The two most famous holes are classic Morris. The par-5 4th – The Klondyke – at first snakes through the dunes before serving up a blind second shot over them, while the 5th – Dell – takes ‘blind’ to another level, a short par 3 to a long shallow green sandwiched between 30ft dunes front and back.
The 6th then plays back towards the ocean, and one of Lahinch’s greatest strengths is that a significant number of fairways, greens or tees lie a mere chip and run from either the crashing Atlantic waves or the calmer Inagh estuary.
Lahinch Golf Club Old Course Review – Golf Monthly Verdict
A difficult course featuring subtle architectural tweaks to an already stunning natural canvas
This article Lahinch Golf Club Old Course Review appeared first on Golf Monthly.