Cashen

Few courses carry the weight of comparison as heavily as Cashen does. Opened in 1995 and designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., it was always going to live in the long shadow of Ballybunion's legendary Old Course next door — one of the most celebrated links in the world. Jones himself called Ballybunion's duneland among the finest terrain he had ever encountered for golf, and Cashen makes full use of it, routing through a wilder, more dramatic stretch of the same towering sand hills that frame the Atlantic coastline of north Kerry.

Where the Old Course has the warmth of tradition and a century of refinement, Cashen is rawer and more demanding — a layout that asks for precise shot-making through corridors carved between massive dunes, with the wind off the Shannon Estuary capable of turning a manageable hole into something altogether more difficult.

Ballybunion itself is a small seaside town that exists, in large part, because of golf. Playing Cashen means arriving somewhere that takes the game seriously — and a course that rewards golfers willing to engage with one of Ireland's most elemental landscapes.