The European Club

One of the newest courses to be built on genuine Irish linksland, The European Club is the lifetime accomplishment of Pat Ruddy, a golf writer from the 1960s and a golf architect from 1975 onward. He mortgaged his home to buy the land and spent five years designing and building it. It opened in 1992 and is still a family business today. Hard against the Irish Sea's Arklow Bay, European Club rolls across an untamed landscape with pot bunkers lined in railroad ties and two extra par-3 holes. The routing explores the diverse coastal dunes with returning nines, a marsh off the seventh tee and a burn looping in front of the 18th green with not a single blind shot anywhere. Ruddy, who tinkers with the course the way Donald Ross groomed Pinehurst No. 2, says he was once offered to sell it for 22 million pounds and passed. That makes the Irish design priceless.