Castlerock (Bann)

Castlerock Golf Club is one of a truly great trio of links courses that lie within a few miles of each other on the Causeway Coast in Northern Ireland. Like the other two courses, at Portstewart and Portrush, Castlerock also has more than just an 18-hole layout to offer golfers.

The 2,446-yard 9-hole Bann is the par 34 relief course for the 18-hole Mussenden and it is routed through magnificent, towering dunes that sit just off the Atlantic shoreline. Created in the mid 1980s by the late Billy Kane who followed a Frank Pennink design, the Bann course is tucked away beyond a caravan park behind the clubhouse and it’s very easy for the casual visitor to know nothing about its existence. Once on the course, golfers are isolated in their own private little golfing world, hidden from view, for the most part.

The 5th is a 491-yard par five, called “Bannview” and it’s a truly memorable hole played downhill all the way to a green flanked by sand hills on three sides with the River Bann running all the way down the right side of the fairway – wonderful! This is the tough wee course the juniors practice on here at Castlerock, so look out for even more fine golfers to emerge from this part of Ireland in the future.

There's just one lone bunker on the Bann course at the front left of the 3rd hole, Kellys Eye, and it really shouldn’t come into play on this 92-yarder which sports a long and narrow bone-shaped green. Rollercoaster is a cliché much used in describing a round played over tortuous terrain but it is the perfect description of what it is like to play the Bann – severe elevation changes, left and right doglegs, blind shots galore –you’ll find them all here on a modern course steeped in old fashioned golfing values.

James W Finegan on the course: “As for the third nine, called the Bann course, it is a jewel. Just under 3,000 yards and closer to the sea than the eighteen [Mussenden], it sticks resolutely to the duneland, its fairways and greens are elusive targets, and honest shot-making is called for (but not brawn) hole after hole.” From Where Golf is Great – the finest courses of Scotland and Ireland.