The first thing you touch at Ardglass is stone that was laid in 1405. The clubhouse here is the oldest building used as a clubhouse anywhere in the world, and it still wears its age honestly. The original castle fortification sits nearest the sea and butts right up against the first tee. Beside it runs the addition of 1788, where most of the golf operations and the restaurant live now. You go from the dining room to the opening drive in a few strides, with the wind off the water at your back. Inside those fifteenth-century walls is a warm-up net, and it may be the finest place in golf to loosen up before a round. Atop one of the castle pillars nearby, a sign reads "Hole 1 360 yards." The current back tee measures just under 340. The arithmetic invites you to look up at the flat top of the castle and wonder whether golfers once struck their opening shot from up there. Nobody can quite prove it from the sign alone. Still, it hangs there, a small riddle at the very start of the round. Ardglass is a small fishing town about twenty miles up the coast from Royal County Down. The course sits elevated on a rocky prominence above a fierce sea. It began in 1896 as just seven holes, laid roughly over the ground where today's first and eighteenth play. Those few holes grew to nine and were stretched longer. By 1970, with additional land acquired, Ardglass had its full eighteen. The course has kept adjusting since. Its most recent changes came at the 10th, 16th and 17th, made so that wayward shots would stop troubling the neighboring communities. The old par-3 10th became a short par 4. The old par-4 16th was lengthened into a par 5 that now ends halfway down what was once the 17th fairway, and a new par-3 17th was built. Slowly but surely, the links has widened its footprint and found its place beside its neighbors. The routing bends like a figure eight with a fish hook at the end of it, and it covers nearly two miles of jagged rocky cliffs. That is the heart of the place. This is links golf of a different kind. You won't find the sandy dunescapes of Portrush or County Down. Ardglass offers rugged rock and open air instead, and views that make you stop mid-stride and forget the card in your pocket. What it lacks in sand, it repays in the drama of the land itself. The architecture stays out of the way of all that. The greens are simple and the bunkering is minimal, in the old-world manner. The real test is the battle with the elements and the terrain. Out on those cliffs, the wind and the rock ask more of you than any bunker could, and the round becomes a matter of holding your nerve on ground that was never meant to be gentle. Just west of the club lies Coney Island, the original one, not the one in Brooklyn. It has been made locally famous by Van Morrison, the Northern Irish native who made trips there as a young boy with his mother. And when the round is done, wind-battered and salt-stung, the Arms Bar is where the day is meant to end. A local who knows the course well will swear it pours the best pint of Guinness in Ireland, and after an afternoon on those cliffs you will not be inclined to argue. Ardglass is hard to explain from a distance. You have to walk out of a six-hundred-year-old castle, onto a cliff, into the weather, and feel how strange and lovely it is to play golf there.