Ballybunion (Cashen) - Kerry - Ireland

Cashen is a fabulous 2nd offering at Ballybunion. One of the great ways to play 36 while in Ireland. They let you grab a buggie and go. But there are quite a number of fabulous holes here. It's really a must play. Would you travel far and play just Cashen....I think not but to go play the Old and not Cashen is not proper. If it stood on its own my thoughts would be it would garner better reviews.

I really don't understand the bad reviews that the Cashen Course gets. Its a spectacular golf course that is completely different than its big brother next door. It requires a different set of skills than most links course but to be honest most links courses are different from each other anyways. My own home course is links but you have to play target golf there, thats just the nature of it and the layout.

If you have the chance to play here then you should, but go with an open mind and be ready to accept the course for what it is. A unique challenge in the most spectacular of locations

If you want to really know the standing of the Cashen Course as seen by the management of Ballybunion just check out the greens fees during high seasons for both courses. The Cashen is nearly 70% lower than the Old Course. That's a dramatic discount and the reason is a simple one -- the new course on the block has more holes than what sunk the Titanic.

I have played the course twice during my visits to the facility and frankly the course could have been something really special but for one glaring mistake. The club hired the wrong person to design it. Robert Trent Jones, Sr., created his fair share of top courses but his thinking of what links golf should be is completely misguided here.

The Cashen is blessed with some of the finest sand dunes one can find and it should have behooved Jones to accentuate a playability aspect that's sadly missing. One has to wonder his thought process when you encounter varying wind velocities that necessitates the inclusion of a ground game option. Point-to-point golf is certainly doable - but only for the most skilled of players.

Although the course is not long yardage wise it requires a steady and unrelenting diet of target golf to the max degree. The fairways are choked to such a degree that anyone hitting driver had best be in the league with such stalwarts as Fred Funk and the late Calvin Peete.

When I think of the Cashen Course I think of a direct connection to Old Head -- a truly missed opportunity there as well but at least at that layout there are a few holes of serious stature.

For anyone to see the Cashen as being in the same league with the Old Course is beyond boggling -- it speaks of complete ignorance on the nature of what authentic links golf is about. For the Cashen to be rated among Ireland's top ten courses is beyond head scratching

The best thing that could happen is for another architect to be brought in and start anew. Land of this nature should not be wasted with such a mediocre outcome.

M. James Ward

I don't know why we persist in playing this thing. Target golf and links golf don't go together, and if there was any doubt just venture onto the back 9 of the Cashen course, where green sites were chosen with seemingly no regard for how to get the golfer to them.

They might look cool in the photos, but hitting a bunch of hybrids and irons off the tee to one target area isn't a lot of fun. And that really is what's on tap. Far too many shots are predetermined by the terrain/holes.

The replay round is cheap, but we should do what the members do, which is just play the front 9 or loop it twice. While still inflicted with RTJ's ideas, the terrain is less drastic and the holes less silly because of it.

As you can tell from this review, my sentiment towards this course is a bogey, but I will concede some may find something enjoyable in playing it and at least for the traveling golfer, playing it once is worth it. So on that basis and on the quality of a few of the par 3s, I can give it a Par rating.

The Cashen course is always going to struggle in comparison to the Old Course at Ballybunion. I understand that a number of changes have been made since it first opened to make it more playable, but at the end of the day what you have here is genuine big dunes links terrain, but unfortunately greens that don't make sense. The greens are often small with extremely penal areas around them, often with no approach possibility than the aerial route. On a windy day like I played it (and I presume the wind blows here on a regular basis) it was extremely difficult for a high teens handicapper to hold any greens as you are forced to play target golf. I feel if this course had been designed by someone more in tune with links golf / weather conditions the results could have been better.

regardless, it was still a lot of fun to play this course, and I usually embrace a bit of quirk over 'fairness' but still seems a bit of an opportunity lost.

Would i go back - yes. If I had 3 rounds here, id play 2x old and 1x cashen.

The most spectacular dunes at Ballybunion aren't on the Old course, but on a site next to it, so it is no wonder that the club decided to build another course there. It is not your grandfather's relief course, though. The Cashen in many ways turned out to be even harder than the Old, mostly due to the severe terrain and the target golf requirements on firm and fast soil. Robert Trent Jones is a legendary parkland architect and so his take on links golf was bound to be controversial. Click the link to read more… Ireland – any decent golf on the West Coast?