Carne offers two distinct Championship Links course routings – the Wild Atlantic Dunes course and the original Hackett course routing.
The original Hackett course was the last course designed by the legendary Irish golf course architect, Eddie Hackett, and it is often feted as his best work. True to Eddies’ philosophy for respecting the natural landscape, the tees and greens occurred naturally and very little earthmoving equipment was used in the development of the course, which took over 8 years to complete. Eddie himself said that “ultimately…there will be no better Links course in Ireland”. Eddie could see the enormous potential in the dramatic dunescape at Carne, and Carne is now reaching that potential, with the addition of the Wild Atlantic Dunes course routing.
The Wild Atlantic Dunes course routing integrates the back nine of the original Hackett course with the new nine created by Ally McIntosh/Jim Engh (formerly known as the Kilmore 9), and is based on the original vision and sketches of Eddie Hackett envisaged for the most dramatic part of the dunescape at Carne Links. This course routing was launched in 2020, despite Covid, and it is being hailed by golf commentators as the finest example of natural links golf in the world. Rated at number 11 in Links courses in Ireland, it is arguably the most spectacular links course in Ireland, raw and untamed, with increased drama as the holes weave their way through the awe inspiring corners of the dune system.
A visit to Carne would be incomplete without playing both courses. The two course routings, Hackett and the Wild Atlantic Dunes, are each played on consecutive days, and therefore most golfers now stay for two days to experience both course routings. We also offer 27 holes in one day.
David DeSmith, renowned golf journalist, beautifully sums up the Carne experience in his recent article for Links magazine, and we could not put it better ourselves.
“When you motor up the Ballina Road, through the tidy Irish village of Béal an Mhuirthead (a.k.a.Belmullet), past McDonnells Bar & Undertakers, through the Main Street roundabout, and up around the tip of Blacksod Bay, you get a glimpse of what awaits you at Carne Golf Links several miles before you reach the car park. Dunes. Gargantuan dunes. Brobdingnagian dunes. Epic, grassy summits – some as tall as 12 storey buildings – that lie across the linksland like sleeping giants who’ve overindulged in Guinness. This remote County Mayo section of western Ireland’s Wild Atlantic Way is celebrated for its dramatic headlands and silvery strands where surfers share the shoreline with sandpipers. But for the travelling golfer, few sights herald more drama than that which unfolds on 27 prodigious holes.
Carne’s rugged, natural links were developed on a shoestring budget beginning in 1989. With tourism in mind, the local nonprofit organisation that owns and operates the course acquired 220 acres of farmland and invited Irish course designer Eddie Hackett to create the original 18. The fetching first nine of the Hackett course occupies gentler ground before its second ushers you high into sandhill heaven. Nine additional holes, the Kilmore nine, were routed through the site’s most imposing dunes in 2013.
Some lean times followed, and Carne had to weather a series of economic downturns that would’ve forced less determined souls to shutter the operation. But, in time, that new nine, which allowed for the creation of a second, composite 18, put Carne on the world golf map and made it a destination unto itself. They named the new course Wild Atlantic Dunes, and wild it most certainly is, both in the profound naturalness of its seaside setting and the giddy exuberance you feel as you step onto each tee.
The Wild Atlantic Dunes expedition begins at the uphill-then-downhill-then-uphill-again par-five 1st, where the fairway splits two lower-level dunes before culminating at a wide, sloping green backstopped by a mountain of marram. From the moment you crest that first rise, you begin to feel small – as insignificant against the sheer scale of Carne as one of its visiting tortoiseshell butterflies. Moments later, though, when you reach the sky-high 2nd tee, you’re king of the hill, as the enormity of Carne’s supersized dunes comes fully into view and you contemplate a steeply downhill tee shot en route to an elevated green you cannot yet see.
As much as this vertigo-inducing landscape factors into playing the course, its charms don’t end there. Hackett’s design work, including on the less tumultuous nine, is masterful, yielding one stirring challenge after another. And the towering Kilmore nine, completed from Hackett sketches by Ally McIntosh and Jim Engh, elevates the excitement level even higher, bother literally and metaphorically. Very little earth was moved here. It didn’t need to be. The natural dells and hilltops where the green sites sit, the valleys and ridges that define the margins of the knobby fairways, the sand pits that attract wayward orbs like black holes – they were all largely here, just waiting for golf to employ them.
Edward Burns shot a soon-to-be-released feature film at Carne in 2024, Finnegan’s Foursome, about two bickering brothers who go on a trip to scatter the ashes of their Irish golf-pro father. A bench that figures into the story still sits beside the 10th tee. It’s an ideal spot to pause and take in the splendors of Carne before finishing your round and joining its snoozing giants in a Guinness of your own.”
