ROYAL COUNTY DOWN

Royal County Down has two superb eighteen-hole courses. The links of Newcastle are exhilarating even without a club in your hand. For a start, the links themselves are not effete pimples, but rise on a heroic scale, with faint echoes of Royal Birkdale here and there, and they are mainly covered with gorse bushes which daub the landscape with splashes of ochre when the flowers are in bloom.
As a backdrop, the Mountains of Mourne loom heavily against the sky, subtly changing colour under the play of the sunshine and shade just as the Irish sea switches its mood. Spice the picture with a hint of peat smoke in the wind and you have a setting which all the billions of property developers could never reproduce.
The strip of duneland was 90 % along the road to being a golf course long before the game was invented. All it ever needed from the hand of man was a minimum of adjustment, the levelling and teeing grounds, moulding greens and the digging of bunkers. And all it needs now is restraint from the hand of man.

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