Five miles west of Royal Portrush, the town of Portstewart keeps a links that has long lived in a famous neighbor's shadow. Its reputation cannot quite stand up to the other place. Yet anyone who climbs into the dunes at the Strand Course may begin to suspect that the shadow runs the wrong way, that these hills might stand taller than the ones watching over Portrush. The reputation belongs to the neighbor. The ground here has a strong argument of its own. It began modestly. In the 1890s a group of amateur enthusiasts cobbled together a course west of town, pressed flush against the Portstewart Strand. The first official design came from A. G. Gow, the head professional at the time. In the late 1910s Willie Park Jr. came to touch up the course. Many of those early holes, Gow's and Park's alike, are still in play, so a round here is in part a walk through decisions made on this ground more than a century ago. The course might have stayed just that. Then, in the 1980s, the club bought a sector of land to the west called Thistly Hollow. The ground is enormous: dramatic dunes towering over the sea to the north and over the original course to the south and east. Someone had to turn that wild country into golf, and the job went to Des Griffin, one of the town's schoolteachers. He laid out seven new holes in the dunes, and with them the front nine was rerouted. There is something lovely in that. The most dramatic stretch of golf in Portstewart was drawn by one of the town's own. What Griffin made of Thistly Hollow is now arguably one of the best and most dramatic opening nines in the world. The back tees on the fourth and eighth sit on some of the highest points in the whole dune complex. Even players with no business on those tees, and on a course this brawny most should stay forward, ought to walk back to the tips on those two holes just to stand there. The views of the surrounding country are incredible, and the scale of what the club bought in the 1980s becomes plain. The second half asks something different. The back nine is more benign, playing down toward the River Bann on the southern end of the property. After the drama of the front, it can feel like coming down off a mountain into a valley. That is the character of the Strand: a burst of dune spectacle joined to a gentler run toward the river, the two halves settled into one round, and the whole of it a more modern example of the beauty on display in Northern Ireland. In 2017 the Irish Open came to Portstewart for the first time, and the dunes got their audience. A 22-year-old named Jon Rahm won by six shots. It was his first DP World Tour victory and only his second win as a professional, and it felt fitting that a young player found his footing on a course still writing its own reputation. Half a mile up the road sits a quaint coffee shop called Lost & Found, a good place for a cup and a beautiful view before heading out. Order something warm, and consider that the better hills on this coast may have been hiding in Thistly Hollow all along, waiting for a schoolteacher to find the golf in them.