Laytown & Bettystown Links Golf Club

Few stretches of Irish coastline carry as much golfing history as the dunes between Laytown and Bettystown on the Meath coast. The club dates to 1909, making it one of the older links clubs on the east side of Ireland, and the course runs across natural duneland just north of the River Nanny estuary, where the land folds and tumbles in the way that produces honest, unhurried links golf — the kind that rewards local knowledge and punishes overconfidence in equal measure.

The layout is a genuine links: tight fairways corralled by gorse and rough, greens that feed the ball in unexpected directions, and winds off the Irish Sea that effectively play as a second course depending on direction. It is not a long test by modern championship standards, but it plays considerably harder than the numbers suggest when the wind arrives from the north or east.

County Meath is not traditionally thought of as links country the way Clare or Donegal might be, but this corner of the coast quietly offers some of the most honest and accessible links golf on the eastern seaboard — unpretentious, member-driven, and genuinely shaped by its surroundings.