Royal Portrush sits on the Northern Ireland coast, and yet many of its ocean views are hidden. A prominent ridge of dune runs between the Dunluce Links and the beach, a wall of grass and sand that keeps much of the water out of sight. It is a strange, almost teasing kind of seaside golf. The ocean is close at hand, and the land itself becomes the spectacle: towering dunes, and between them a gentler, medium-sized rumple of ground that seems perfectly scaled for golf, as if the site had been waiting for the game. The architect who answered it, in the end, was Harry Colt. There was golf here before him, an original course by Old Tom Morris, and a club that began life as the County Golf Club before the Duke of York granted it royal appointment in 1892. Three years later, under the patronage of the Prince of Wales, it was renamed Royal Portrush Golf Club. But the course people mean when they speak of Portrush now is Colt's. He was asked to redesign the links in 1923 and did not begin building until 1929. By then he was late in a career of more than 300 designs, bringing exceptional experience to the work. The new course opened in 1933 and took the name Dunluce, after the castle that has stood atop the oceanside cliffs since the 1300s. From the fifth green you can look up the coastline to the west and find it there, keeping watch over the holes that bear its name. What Colt did with the greens is what sets Portrush apart from most of the old links of Ireland and Scotland. On many older courses the greens were found rather than built, flat sections among the dunes chosen as putting surfaces, and so they tend toward simplicity. Portrush came late in the Golden Age of golf architecture, and Colt had advanced skills in green building. Here the greens are dynamic and intricate, elaborate in a way the old found greens rarely are. Put those surfaces together with dramatic landforms and a quality routing, and you have something rare: a links that feels both wild and deeply considered. The new course was less than twenty years old when history arrived. In 1951 Portrush hosted the Open Championship, the first played outside Great Britain. Then came a long silence, nearly seventy years, before the oldest major returned to Northern Ireland in 2019. The wait was worth it, and it ended with an Irishman, Shane Lowry, lifting the Claret Jug on the Dunluce Links. Before that championship, the course underwent its first major alteration since Colt's redesign. Mackenzie & Ebert replaced the original 17th and 18th with a new par-5 seventh and par-4 eighth, borrowing land from the Valley Course. They rebuilt the greens at the second, third and tenth and added several new tees and bunkers. The work continued in smaller strokes in preparation for the 2025 Open. It is a delicate thing, editing a master, and the new holes now take their place among the dunes Colt shaped into a championship test. The place carries its royalty lightly, though it has plenty of it. In 2016 Queen Elizabeth II visited Royal Portrush, her first official visit to any golf club. Beyond the links, the Giant's Causeway and the Carrick-a-Rede Rope Bridge are worth a stop. Yet the spirit of the town lives just as much down at the Harbour Bar, the best-known pub in Portrush and Darren Clarke's regular spot. It is a tiny place, crowded floor to ceiling with golf memorabilia, a 2012 Ryder Cup player trophy among them, and it calls its pint the best Guinness in Ireland. Order one from the local legend known as Bomber, and it seems the only proper way to end a day spent among those hidden-sea dunes.