County Sligo Golf Club, Rosses Point

The West of Ireland Amateur Open has been played over these links since 1923, and it now falls at Easter, a fixed point in the Irish golfing calendar. The club behind it came together on 18 October 1894, at a meeting in Sligo Courthouse with Colonel James Campbell in the chair, and George Combe laid out the first nine. Captain William Campbell added the second nine from 1906. In 1927 the members brought in Harry Shapland Colt, who kept almost nothing of the old course and routed his own eighteen anticlockwise, drawing on St Andrews and Royal Troon. Pat Ruddy revised the links in 2013, and Martin Ebert rebuilt three greens in 2024.

Tom Watson, Nick Faldo and Bernhard Langer have praised the design; Rory McIlroy, Pádraig Harrington and Shane Lowry have competed here. The card reads like a local map. The 10th is Benbulben, 466 yards, played under the flat-topped mountain the club calls Ireland's table mountain. The 3rd tee holds the wide view: five counties on a clear day, the cliffs of Slieve League, Lissadell House across the bay, Queen Maeve's grave on Knocknarea. The 16th is Knocknarea itself. The 9th is Cast a Cold Eye; W.B. Yeats spent his boyhood summers at Rosses Point. The hole that settles cards is the 17th, The Gallery, 470 yards, stroke index 2. The black tees measure 7,157 yards, and the club sums the place up in four words: Atlantic winds, dunes, drama.