The town takes its name from the Bunion family, who held a castle here in the fifteenth century, but for golfers the word has long meant something else: a wild links laid out among the largest, most formidable sand dunes in Ireland, pressed against the Atlantic off Sandhill Road. Drive out from the village, a place of fewer than two thousand people, and the land opens up beside you like a held breath let go. It did not arrive fully formed. A twelve-hole course designed by James McKenna appeared in 1893, and the club struggled for money and folded in 1898. It came back in 1906 as a nine-holer designed by Lionel Hewson and grew to eighteen in 1926. Even then it stayed a quiet secret until the club was chosen to host the Irish Championship in 1937. Tom Simpson came with his partner, the champion golfer Molly Gourlay, met the captain and committee, and told them he "could not improve on God's work." Then he went ahead and redesigned three holes and made subtle alterations to thirteen in all. That contradiction may be the truest thing about Ballybunion: a place everyone swears should not be touched, touched carefully all the same. Simpson made some of the changes himself. Others crept in over the next couple of decades as the club found the money. Little changed after that, for a long while. Simpson said that "the beauty of the terrain surpasses that of any golf course we know, not excepting Pine Valley in America." In the 1970s the American Herbert Warren Wind called it "nothing less than the finest seaside course I have ever seen," and visitors began to come. Then Tom Watson arrived in 1981 and fell for it completely. "After playing Ballybunion for the first time," he wrote, "a man would think that the game of golf originated here." He described the long grass on dunes that pitch and roll, and said many architects should live and play here before they build golf courses. The holes earn that kind of devotion. Just off the first lies the Killehenny Cemetery, which shouldn't be in play and yet sees plenty of business. On a calm day you cannot see how, but the caddies all have stories. The 2nd, "Kennells," is a long 445-yard par four, the tee shot threading a narrow gap between towering dunes, a long approach still to come to a raised plateau green. The 7th, "Castle Green," plays 432 yards from a tee perched on the cliff edge above the shore. The 11th, "Watsons," is 472 yards of supremely challenging par four and the closest thing the course has to a signature. The routing once began at what is now the sixth, so players took on all the dune holes first and came home over today's third to fifth, a gentle detox after the drama. The land is so good, and the rough between holes taxes the next shot so quietly, that you hardly need bunkers at all. With a gentle breeze a very good player might score. In an onshore gale, scoring is beside the point, and the only task is to enjoy it. Bill Clinton played here in 1998 and is said to have used his mulligans freely. At the end of 2015 the club did something bold. Over a couple of months, Atlantic Golf Construction, supervised by architect Graeme Webster, replaced all eighteen soft poa annua greens with fine fescue and added revetted faces to around forty bunkers. They moved the 7th green closer to the sea and raised dunes behind it to mask the 8th tees. They shaped the right side of the 8th green so the hole blended more elegantly into the sandhills, and swapped the stone paving at the back-to-back par threes, 14 and 15, for grass paths. The club might have spent years coaxing the change along, but it chose to make it all at once.