On Christmas Eve, 1893, William Pickeman, a Scottish insurance broker, and his friend George Ross rowed across the water from Sutton to a sandy peninsula that could only safely be reached by boat. Pickeman knew at once what he was looking at. The land belonged to John Jameson, of the distilling family, and tenant farmers scratched a living there, though from around 1850 the Jamesons had also used the links as their private course. Pickeman and Ross negotiated a lease, and Portmarnock began the way the best links do: with someone seeing a game already hidden in the sand. Mungo Park, who had won the 1874 Open at Musselburgh, directed, or at least helped shape, the design of the first nine and became the club's first professional. Those holes opened in December 1894. Two years later another Scot, George Coburn, carried the course to eighteen. Pickeman, the driving force behind it all, went on to design other courses in Ireland, but this two-mile spit of some 500 acres was his lasting act of vision. What strikes you here is how little anyone has needed to impose. There is nothing man-made about Portmarnock. Water lies on three sides, fine sand drains beneath, and an aquifer below keeps the fescue so firm that winter golf plays almost as firm as summer on many other links. The club motto is "Be Up," which becomes a quiet joke the first time your ball bounces beside the flag and keeps running. Two loops of nine send you off in different directions, so the wind is never the same companion twice. From the back tees it stretches to just under 7,500 yards. The place has been nudged more than rebuilt. In 1938 the 8th and 10th were altered together. The old 8th, a 316-yard par four, had pitched over the Valley of Sin, which still sits left of the present 10th green, to that very green. Today's speeds would never allow it. A new 8th green lengthened the hole to 396 yards, the course grew from 7,016 to 7,208, and Portmarnock was reputed the longest in the British Isles. In 1971 Fred Hawtree added a third nine for a modest £3,500, touching the championship holes only with a new fairway and green at the 6th. Before the 2003 Irish Open his son Martin reshaped the 1st, built a new par-three 12th and added runoffs on five holes. Through all of it, the original footprint has held. The sea keeps its own counsel. In the late 1980s the club built holes out on the foreshore, from across the 3rd around the 4th. They were exciting, and a storm washed them away soon after they opened. The corridors and greens are still visible, and once a year members play a two-club competition across them called the Outer Lands, on ground the water lent and took back. Bernard Darwin loved the greens above all, "very fast without being untrue," he wrote, "a rare and shining virtue." He knew of no greater finish in the world than the last five holes. The 385-yard 14th wants an accurate approach to a narrow green. Joe Carr, an amateur, is said to have found it from the tee. The 15th, a 190-yard par three along the shore, sends any left-to-right tee shot to the beach and guards its front with three bunkers. In the second round of the 1988 Irish Open, Ian Woosnam put his tee shot in the sea, found the edge of the green with his third, holed from 40 feet for bogey, and went on to win. The Irish Open has come here nineteen times, along with the Canada Cup and the Walker Cup. But the best moment may be a clear day with Ireland's Eye and its seabirds to the south, the Hill of Howth nearby, and the Mountains of Mourne faint in the northwest, the whole peninsula still feeling like somewhere you had to row to reach.