Royal Belfast Golf Club

Though located on the Irish Sea adjacent to Belfast Lough, Royal Belfast is not a links course—it’s a parkland-style design on heavy soils that more closely resembles the golf of San Francisco with sloping terrain, towering hardwoods and fairways that run through gauntlets of bunkers that have recently been fine-tuned by British architects Tom Mackenzie and Martin Ebert. Believed to be the oldest club in Ireland with one of the game’s great clubhouses in a Victorian manor that dates to 1852, the course was laid out by Harry Colt, who managed to layer the holes in a variety of compass directions while running the ninth and 10th, two par 4s, along the shoreline.