282 Steps

It might look like a quiet parking lot with tour buses resting to the right and a few empty tennis courts to the left, but for a golfer, it’s a walk through the wardrobe. Two hundred eighty-two steps in total from the rear entrance of the hotel to the front door of the pro shop, and as players pass beneath a black iron gate, they feel what Lucy must have felt when she pushed through the coats and stepped into a fairy tale.

The comparison isn’t literary hyperbole; C.S. Lewis walked this coastline as a young man, climbing the Mourne Mountains and borrowing the landscape as his inspiration for Narnia. I’ve walked a shorter stretch of County Down early in the morning, while the hotel windows were still dark, and I’ve paced it in the rain after dinner, scouting my path for tomorrow. A green fence gives way to a freshly shorn hedge and, suddenly, a bright-white building capped with red tile. The turf outside its doors is wrinkled and tight and indifferent to your arrival, and you feel as if you’ve slipped past something to get here, unseen and unknown, not a player but a venturer, not an adult but a child pushed on by giddy courage and the prospect of sneaking through. Lewis wasn’t a golfer, but he knew: There’s magic in the hills of Mourne.

A great golf walk has ingredients—drama and delight, surprise and wonder—and we can each recall different paths as the footsteps we wish we were following right now (up to 16 at Cypress; down 18 at the Old; any tract at ANGC). But I’ve walked a few, and for my money—be it dollars or pounds—the finest walk in golf doesn’t even take place on a course. Rather, it carries one from the back of the Slieve Donard Hotel in Newcastle, Northern Ireland, to the clubhouse of Royal County Down. Most of us get there by bus or by car through the club’s main entrance, but if you plan your trip properly, you can pass through a great golfing portal and feel the adventure of a true arrival. You can eye the mountain to your back, where a high and ancient tomb was believed to be the entryway to Tír na nÓg, the Irish afterworld of eternal youth and beauty, and, having abandoned modernity and doubt somewhere along those 282 steps, you might believe that such places exist.

They say the journey often trumps the destination, but this walk’s caliber is very much tied to its ends. The first step matters, and it should be taken after booking a night at the Slieve Donard beneath the mountain from which the hotel takes its name (slieve from the Irish sliabh, meaning “mountain”; Donard, an anglicized version of Domhanghart, the holy hermit who minded the mountaintop centuries ago). Set tightly between the Irish Sea and the links of Royal County Down, the hotel is a red-brick colossus overlooking the sand and waves. Its dozen turrets are dominated by a tower befitting a cathedral, and in its careful nooks and corners you can almost see the masons’ hands at work as you lament the days of artfully inefficient architecture.

The cheaper rooms at the Slieve offer the view you’ve come for. Eschew the seaside windows for those overlooking the rear parking lot, where you’ll spy the gate to RCD separated from the hotel grounds by nothing wider than a cart path. Imagine the Waldorf Astoria planted beside Pine Valley, with a walkway connecting the two. Don’t skip the full Irish breakfast in the vaulted dining room, where you’ll daydream of the waxed mustaches and hoop dresses of yore drifting between brass and mahogany, then take the hallway from the lobby down to the spa (where hopefully you spent last evening in the bubbles, overlooking the sea). Don’t mind the wedding party; the whole island is tying the knot right now, and you’ll see brides posed by putting greens on a Wednesday, Thursday or Friday evening. The spa desk will ignore you when they see your clubs—they know where you’re going, and it’s out the rear door, where a sculpture of a half-clad woman called Libertà signals the joy ahead, her arms flung to the sky and pointing you forward. Pass the tennis courts, upon which nary a ball has bounced (wrong sport for Newcastle), and find the gateway, its iron textured from decades of fresh coats of black paint. Beneath gold that reads Slieve Donard Hotel, bold white letters pull you through: ROYAL COUNTY DOWN GOLF CLUB. In America, it’s an entrance beside which you’d expect a guard, or a keypad waiting to be fobbed, but you put left in front of right and in mere minutes you’ve gone from black pudding and rashers to the golf course you’ve been dreaming about for years. It doesn’t seem possible, but the proof is underfoot.

I counted those 282 paces on my last visit, and I took each one slowly. My glance drifted rightward, toward the coast and the course, where a green wooden fence obscures the view—no peeking, not yet. A great golf walk requires suspense, and you get it as you pass a low, blocky building. Is that the clubhouse? It is a clubhouse, but not the one you’re looking for. The Mourne Golf Club dates to 1946, and it’s a spot for locals who live within 3 miles of Newcastle. Lord Annesley, who owned this linksland and for whom RCD’s second course is named, asked that a golf club for residents be created. They share the same fairways with RCD members, and I can’t pass it without wondering about home prices in Newcastle and the waiting list to join. I’ve had RCD caddies invite me over to their clubhouse next door for a pint, and I regret passing each time, having preferred to visit the pro shop and spend like they were charging pennies instead of pounds.

Soon you come upon the cars—never very many—and maybe a bus depositing a tired line of your countrymen bedecked with logos from Lahinch and Ballybunion and Portrush. But if you’ve arrived early or late enough, all you’ll see is an empty lot and a flagpole and a tidy garden that feels homey, like something someone’s grandmother carefully tended in her wellies. On the garden’s far side, markers beside a hut point toward sandy hills that don’t look like a golf hole at all, and you aren’t sure what is going to happen next, but you are sure you’ve never done anything quite like it. 

Find the pro-shop door. Remove your hat. Be gracious and grateful and say hello to the gentleman at the desk. You might even tell him you walked all the way here.

Its 19th-century peers are mostly gone or crumbled, but its neighboring golf course that many believe is the world’s greatest has kept the Slieve Donard humming since 1898. (Charlie Chaplin, King Leopold and Tiger Woods have wandered its rooms.) It’s a favor returned, as the hotel’s founders played no small part in making Royal County Down one of the most special places in golf.

Above the hotel’s grand front entrance, etched into stone, is the signature of the hotel’s original owners: the Belfast & County Down Railway. Their line from Belfast to Newcastle opened the same year as their hotel, and it transformed the village into a booming tourist destination for itinerant Victorians.

“Like a lot of the great links, we’ve got a lot to thank the railways for, for getting people here to discover the golf course,” says former head professional Kevan Whitson, who arrived in Newcastle from Edinburgh in 1992 and retired from his post in 2024. “Originally the golf club was set up by Belfast businessmen who were looking for a place to play golf down the coast. The railway was here, so it was an ideal place for a golf course.”

Golf had been played along Newcastle’s linksland prior to the town getting a rail station—Old Tom visited to lay out some holes in 1889, building on the work of a Scottish schoolteacher named George L. Baillie, who first saw the potential for a local links—but the railway brought the expertise of James Braid, Harry Vardon, J.H. Taylor and, ultimately, Harry Colt, who would route the course we venerate today. It was also the railway that gave the club its unique roots and member identity.

“Before there was a clubhouse, the members used a room at the railway station as their meeting place. They came down from Belfast by rail on Wednesdays and Saturdays, and in the buffet car is where the members started the great tradition at Royal County Down of ‘the hat,’” explains Whitson. “Names would go in the hat—a bowler hat at the time—and whatever names came out of the hat, that’s who you lunched with and played your golf with. And that tradition still exists to this day. On our members days, Wednesdays and Saturdays, you can travel here with your pals, but you arrive and have no idea who you are going to play golf with. The hat man sits and pulls out the names, pins the list in the bar, and then you go for lunch and play with your fellow members. It’s a wonderful way to run a club and mix up the membership.”

And so the names and the architects came to both the course and the hotel, but after battling the blind turns and precise carries of RCD, one wonders how much of the course could possibly be the product of human arrangement—and, if it was, how that human could ever be regarded as anything but a mad savant. Perhaps more than any links in the world, the routing at RCD feels like strange treasure, an unburied wonder, a course with no regard for how you’d like to play it, demanding you respect and learn it as it is. It can be frustrating on first go-round, and playing it without a caddie is death by a thousand lost balls, but with each playing I’ve learned a new shot or better angle; it’s been a one-sided courtship that, like most unrequited loves, can turn to infatuation. 

I’m still so far from getting it, and for that I love it even more. Maybe that’s what’s so special about the parking-lot walk for those of us who have been there before. We arrive unnoticed but hopeful, chests thumping with possibility. We haven’t come to walk through the wardrobe; rather, we’re here to throw pebbles at panes of bedroom glass, convinced this is finally the evening the window opens.  •