Portmarnock Golf Club

W.C. Pickeman and George Ross, two insurance men from Sutton, rowed across the estuary on Christmas Eve 1893 to look at the ground. They found what the club still calls a narrow tongue of shallow duneland, running into the Irish Sea north of Dublin, took a lease on it, and opened the first nine holes there on 26 December 1894. Pickeman laid them out himself, with Mungo Park advising on the greens. The course went to eighteen in 1896, the year the clubhouse rose on its present site; that clubhouse burned on 30 December 1905. The Irish Open has been played here nineteen times between 1927 and 2003, Ballesteros and Olazábal among the winners, and The Amateur Championship came in 1949 and again in 2019.

The championship eighteen is par 72 and 7,463 yards, one part of 27 holes on the peninsula. Its routing has changed once. A new par three went in as the fifteenth in 1927, and that is the hole the course is known for. The 27 holes came later: a third nine, drawn by Fred Hawtree in 1967, opened in 1971 on ground the club had bought to the north. Otherwise the ground has been left as it was, which on a strip this narrow is less restraint than arithmetic. There is nowhere else to put a hole. In May 2021 the members voted 83.4 per cent to 16.6 to admit women, and the first women members were elected the following year.