St Anne's Golf Club

We’ve added St Anne’s Golf Club to the Top 100 website following a comment made by Pat Ruddy, who responded to a County Louth player review dated 13 August 2010. It’s a course we’d overlooked, but we felt it warranted inclusion initially as an Irish gem and subsequently as a ranked Irish course.

Bull Island lies just off Dublin Bay, where the River Liffey runs into the Irish Sea. The island is man-made, formed in the early 19th century by the building of a sea wall and Captain William Bligh, of Bounty fame, is said to have been involved in its design. The island is home to a wide variety of wildlife that inhabit the marram covered dunes, scrub and marshland in a designated UNESCO Biosphere Reserve.

St. Anne’s Golf Club shares Bull Island with The Royal Dublin Golf Club and it was around the time that Harry Colt rebuilt the Royal course – following its use as a military training site by the British Army during the Great War – that nine holes were laid out by members and a club established in 1921. Eddie Hackett was involved in adding another nine holes in the late 1980s and a recent investment program has substantially upgraded both the course and clubhouse.

St. Anne’s is a compact links with many of the holes running parallel to each other between low lying sand hills that add character and definition to a fairly flat landscape. The four short holes here are all challenging, particularly those at the 3rd and 10th, where small water hazards come into play close to the green. The toughest hole on the card is “Brent,” a 476-yard par four that doglegs slightly left to a semi-blind green, with out of bounds lurking to the right of the fairway.

Interestingly, a number of greens and teeing areas on the back nine of the course were replaced when Dublin’s famous Croke Park stadium was reconstructed at the start of the new millennium and this process involved the careful lifting and relaying of hallowed turf from the old GAA pitch onto designated areas of the St.Anne’s site.