Tom Coyne, author of Paper Tiger, is making his way across Ireland on foot this summer, playing every links golf course in the country. In Fall 2008, he'll publish a book about his adventures, A Course Called Ireland. In the meantime, he'll be writing a travel journal for GOLF.com. This is the third installment; the entire journal is here.
I have played rounds of golf where it felt like the green was surrounded by some sort of impenetrable barrier, a protective force-field built of my own ball-striking shortcomings. Some days, the greens look the size of English muffins, surrounded by sticky moats of sorrow. But it wasn't until I teed it up on Mulranny Golf Links in County Mayo that I understood that some greens are truly harder to get to than others. Because some greens are surrounded by barbed wire.
I have some misgivings about kicking off a discussion of the Mulranny Links by bringing up the level-three security surrounding their nine fine putting surfaces, as Mulranny is a lovely and natural setting for a game of golf, set directly on the water, a plot of wind-lashing links fun. Built the way God intended, sans bulldozers and backhoes, Mulranny is a playable, compact nine-holer, with a fair amount of undulation and variety for a golf course of its size (a second set of tees rearranges the par and distances for your second nine).
Indeed, I've become quite charmed by Ireland's nine-hole courses. Links layouts typically possess so many unseen mounds and valleys, a first-timer usually finds himself wishing for another go. At the nine-hole courses I've been playing along Ireland's coast (Spanish Point, Mulranny, Clew Bay, and Achill Island to this point), I get that second chance straight away, and I typically play more tidy on the back nine, less the timid tourist I was on the front.
And as unexcited as the Mulranny members might be about their course possessing green-side hazards that could lead to a tetanus shot, I found everything about the place to be charming, challenging and just a lot of fun. To knock it along a stretch of seaside turf that you are sharing with donkeys, sheep, cows and horses is an absolute treat. A worth-the-trip throwback to the way golf was originally played, on pastures shared with one's herd, where that first ruling was made and the first relief taken from a steaming livestock left-behind. And there are a few such deposits to be negotiated around the Mulranny fairways, a small price to pay for grass kept at ideal fairway length by dozens of hungry greenskeepers in fuzzy white coats. The greens are thankfully devoid of any such obstructions, rolling fair and true, nary a hoof print to be found anywhere. See, that's where the fences come in.
I was interested to find that a number of courses in Ireland currently or formerly sit upon what is known as "commenage," which in my limited, overheard-it-in-the-pub understanding, is land that was not walled in when the land acts came into being, i.e., property that was utilized by many, with no one rightful owner. Such lands were shared between a number of shareholders (how they decided who the shareholders would be, and how many there would be, no one seemed able to explain). The Mulranny Links resides upon a stretch of land owned by 28 shareholders, the golf club itself holding only one of those shares. So the next time you find yourself complaining about the way things are done at your own club, imagine how it would be if 95 percent of your bondholders were farmers who couldn't give a sheep about golf. You'd be putting up the barbed wire, too.
