Royal County Down begins, in a sense, at a train platform. Like so many of the great links, it owes its life to the railroad, and the club grew out of the stop in Newcastle. In the early days a round started and ended at the station itself. The first hole went out from there and the eighteenth came home to it, and the club kept rooms for its members inside the station. It is hard not to love that picture: a golfer stepping off the train, setting down his things in a room at the station, and walking straight out onto the course. The course those early golfers played was not the one we know now. Royal County Down spent its first forty years changing, and the changes came from many hands. The membership laid out the original holes. Then the club brought in Old Tom Morris to create a new eighteen. In the early 1900s the members took matters into their own hands again, with George Coombe in particular updating the course. Finally the club turned to Harry Colt for the last revisions, and his work produced the vast majority of the eighteen holes that exist today. So the place is an accumulation rather than a single act of genius, a links that was laid out, remade and refined across the decades until it became what it is. Colt's hand shows in some of its most important moments. He added the fourth and fifth holes. He also did something quieter that shapes every round: he took away much of the course's propensity for blind shots. Where the course had once kept so much out of view, Colt made many of its shots more visible, so that a player could more often see where the ball was meant to go. He did not erase the blindness entirely, though. Even after Colt, you will still stand over shots here that ask you to trust what you cannot fully see. The course gives you more sight than it once did, but it never gives you all of it. The ninth is where Colt's rearranging became something close to art. To make it, he turned two existing holes into one and changed the routing around them. The eighth green had sat down by the first green. Colt moved it up to the ridge where it lives now, and that move allowed him to create the ninth. From there comes what may be the most stunning tee shot in all of golf, with the spire from the Slieve Donard and the Mourne Mountains in the distance. It has become one of the most photographed and celebrated holes in the game. It is worth remembering that it exists because someone was willing to take a green from low ground and raise it onto a ridge. That is the lesson of Royal County Down. Its beauty does not feel like the work of one person. It took members who laid out the first holes, Old Tom Morris and his new eighteen, a club man in George Coombe who kept updating the course, and an architect in Colt who opened up many of its hidden shots while leaving some mystery in place. The result is one of the most sublime golf experiences in the world, a links shaped by every hand that worked on it. The railway still lingers in the ritual, too. Before you tee off, breakfast at the Railway Cafe is a fine way to begin, and its coffee is among the best you will find in Northern Ireland. Then head out to the first tee, not far in spirit from the station where the earliest rounds began and ended.