Naas - Kildare - Ireland

The County Kildare Golf Club was established in 1896 and it remained in this guise for exactly 100 years before, in its centenary year, it changed its name to Naas Golf Club.

The first course that members played on was a 9-hole affair at Halverstown. The club moved a further three times before finally settling at Kerdiffstown in 1941. When more land was purchased from the Frederick Ozanam Trust at the end of the 1980s, Arthur Spring extended the 9-hole layout to eighteen holes.

Located between Johnstown and Sallins in County Kildare, Naas Golf Club is a traditional parkland course laid out on rolling terrain with tree-lined fairways. Jeff Howes Golf Design were commissioned in 2002 to redesign half the greens, add several fairway bunkers, build some new tees and install a lake on the older back nine – quite a golfing makeover for a newly named, but long established club!

There are five par threes on the course but the real feature short hole is the 178-yard 17th where the new lake is situated all the way down the right, trees are to the left and the green is protected by two large bunkers on the left – a cracking hole where a three on the card is well earned.

A bunker renovation project was completed by (re)GOLF Design in 2017, with bunkers redesigned in a more classical style, introducing a steep-faced, grass-down bunker lip to the sand hazards using layers of fescue turf in a links-like revetted manner. Increased maintenance was offset by reducing the total area of sand from 6,000 square metres to less than half that number.