The road out to Baltray does something to you before you have struck a ball. The village that lends the links its everyday name is a fishing place, and the approach carries a quiet lift, the sense that something good is waiting just ahead. County Louth Golf Club has been here since 1892, yet it has stayed relatively anonymous except to those in the know. It is one of Ireland's secrets, and one of the great under-the-radar links of the British Isles. The present course was shaped in the late 1930s by the great Tom Simpson, with Molly Gourlay at his side. Simpson did most of his work in Europe, and here on the Louth coast he left something subtle rather than showy. Baltray's landscape is gentle and its water views are few, so it will never set a camera roll on fire. That is exactly the point. This is links golf in an unadulterated form, ground and turf doing the talking. The course is laid out in two loops, and most holes run in different directions, so the day keeps turning beneath you. There is no weak hole to rest on. The back nine is especially entertaining, with several holes running close to the shore and distant views toward the Mountains of Mourne. Simpson's own routing was different. It began on what is now the fourth, ran through today's ninth, and closed the front with what are now the first, second and third. Played that way, the opening stretch would have ranked among the finest in Ireland. The back nine began on the present eleventh and came home on the tenth. In the 1980s the order changed, and anyone who walks the ground today can play Simpson's sequence in their head and wonder. In 2003 Tom Mackenzie made minor changes, most notably new tees that stretched the course beyond 7,000 yards, but the true test was never length. It is the greens. They are Baltray's hallmark and among the very best in the whole of Ireland, and they ask a quiet question all afternoon. Get through eighteen holes without a three-putt and you have earned the right to call yourself a great putter. The club's story lives in its people. Since 1941 it has been home to the East of Ireland Championship, an amateur event open to those who qualify on handicap, which means the gate stands open even to visitors from abroad. Joe Carr won the East twelve times between 1941 and 1969, a record unlikely ever to be beaten, and in 1970 his son Roddy won it too. Darren Clarke took the title in 1989. Baltray also developed two of Ireland's best women golfers. In 1938 Clarrie Tiernan became the first Irish woman to play in the Curtis Cup, at the Essex County Club in Massachusetts, where the United States beat Great Britain and Ireland five and a half to three and a half. Her rival Philomena Garvey became the most successful Irish player of the post-war years. Phil reached the final of the Ladies British Amateur Championship five times, winning at Gleneagles in 1957, and claimed a record fifteen Irish Close titles across eighteen years from 1946. The Irish Open came twice. In 2004 the Australian Brett Rumford won by four strokes. In 2009 the finish was far tighter. Shane Lowry, still an amateur, beat the Englishman Robert Rock in a play-off, and the quiet links on the Louth coast belonged, for one famous afternoon, to an Irish amateur. None of this makes Baltray loud. It remains a championship links that golfers of every level can enjoy, a place more for walking than for photographing. You leave with the Mournes in the distance and the memory of a putt that would not drop, already thinking about the next time.