St. Patrick's Links

It’s always been known that the dunes to the south of the original Rosapenna resort on Ireland’s northwest coast in County Donegal were some of the country’s most profound linksland, though the two original courses that had occupied them since the 1990s with slender, simple fairways running mostly in parallel directions never fulfilled that promise. It wasn’t until Tom Doak began reworking the land in 2019—eliminating most of the holes, maintaining the corridors of others and finding new territories of dunes and sand ridges to explore within the site’s 300 acres along Sheephaven Bay—that the land’s true potential was realized. Opened in 2021, the routing of each nine moves out through buffered channels toward the shore, utilizing broad, bouncy fairways that camber into greens that are either set in hollows or elevated on wind-battered bluffs. In buoyancy, variety and seaside topography, St. Patrick’s rivals the best of what Irish golf has to offer.