Royal Portrush Dunluce Links Review

Colt was asked to redraw Old Tom Morris's course in 1923, did not start building until 1929, and finished in 1932 with what he considered his finest work. He was right. The Dunluce runs over rumpled duneland above the Antrim coast with the Skerries offshore, the ruin of Dunluce Castle along the shore and the Scottish islands on the horizon on a clear day, and it manages the difficult thing: a proper championship examination that a fifteen handicapper still enjoys, because Colt defends with contour, angle and the tilt of his greens rather than with bunkers everywhere.

The fifth, White Rocks, is a 382 yard par four whose green sits on the cliff edge above the beach and tempts every golfer alive into going at it. Calamity Corner at the sixteenth is 236 yards of par three across a gorge with a fifty foot fall away on the right, and there is no bail out that is not itself a punishment. Martin Ebert's work before the 2019 Open cut two new holes from the Valley Links and retired the weak old seventeenth and eighteenth, which improved the finish instead of softening it.

Conditioning holds up all season. The mark against it is money. A round from April to October in 2026 costs 420 pounds, which is Open venue pricing on a links that was a relative bargain ten years ago. It is worth the money. Very little else at that number is.