What does it take to be considered the best golf course in the world? What mix of holes and thrills and vistas go into such a lofty assessment?
This is the question that Royal County Down makes us consider. Sitting at No. 1 in Golf Digest’s ranking of the World’s 100 Greatest Courses, Royal County Down in Northern Ireland certainly possesses the mathematical ingredients of greatness, with strong par 4s that require strength and accuracy, slippery greens that roll off into chipping hollows and roughs, treacherous hazards that enforce calculating play, scintillating views and a routing that turns the game in all directions.
And somehow this arithmetic does almost nothing to explain the magic one feels playing a round of golf here.
Royal County Down, where golf has existed since 1889, is the embodiment of everything we dream links golf should be, with emerald pathways frolicking up and down through high, sandy dunes and darting mischievously around deep, eyebrowed bunkers as the wind bellows sternly off the North Sea with a landscape of wispy fescue and gorse. With the Mountains of Mourne looming mistily above, the journey begins and ends at the foot of the town of Newcastle, its rooftops and church spires a reminder that golf in the United Kingdom is woven into the everyday fiber of these coastal villages in ways players from elsewhere can never fully understand. It is, in a word, enchanting.
And still, this cannot convey what makes Royal County Down special. As much as we attempt to analyze their assets and virtues, what separates truly great courses from others is something ineffable, something beyond words and metrics. Hallowed ground in golf is a feeling, something one inhabits rather than analyzes. Call it a spirituality, an essence. You know it when you feel it.
If you want to know what makes Royal County Down the world’s best golf course, you have to go there.
If you can’t go there, we have the next best thing. Enjoy our presentation of Royal County Down, perhaps our best, cleanest cinematography of a top course in the world as part of our ‘Every Hole At’ series.
This article was originally published on golfdigest.com
