Of Golf and Monsters

A murderous mermaid. Slaughtered Vikings. A homicidal pig.

Death and danger lurk near and amid the soaring dunes at Enniscrone Golf Club in County Sligo, Ireland. Or do they? That depends on whether you believe the myths and legends long associated with one of the country’s most dramatic western links, a club that traces its origins back to 1918.

That threesome of death, though? Those stories go back much further.

They begin with the mermaid untold centuries ago. Thady Rua O’Dowd was elected chieftain of his clan after his father died. His first order of business: Find a bride. But the women he fancied did not fancy him, and those who showed interest did not catch his eye. For weeks, he wandered the beach bordering what is now the golf course. Then, one day, he spied a beautiful woman sitting on a rock overlooking the water, brushing her hair and singing. He noticed she had no clothes on, but a cape was beside her. O’Dowd knew that she was a mermaid, and the cloak allowed her to switch between human and mermaid form. He crept up to her, grabbed the cape and told her of his situation, claiming he would love her forever. Her name was Eve, and she fell for him, too. They returned to his castle and were married, and she soon bore the first of their seven children.

But O’Dowd had a secret: He’d kept Eve’s cape and hidden it in the castle, fearing that if she ever found it, she would return to the sea. One day, O’Dowd was called away to attend to clan business. He moved the cloak to another place in the castle to be sure of its safety. But the youngest child saw him, and after O’Dowd left, he told Eve where his father had “hidden a bag of gold.” She discovered the cape and was immediately consumed with a desire to return to her watery home.

Knowing she could not carry all of her children with her, she took them up to the hillside overlooking Enniscrone’s mammoth dunescape and turned five of them into stones. En route back to the beach, the mermaid-turned-mother cast the same spell on a sixth child before tucking her youngest in the cape and disappearing forever into the sea. For those who know where to find it, the group of five stones, known as “The Children of the Mermaid,” remains hauntingly visible today in a copse of trees on that same hillside.

Death came for the Vikings in the year 891. Having launched several successful coastal invasions around Ireland over the preceding two centuries, they decided to try their luck at Enniscrone. Huge mistake. The fierce locals, led by the O’Dowd clan, were ready and waiting. The ensuing battle was bloody and brutal, with both sides suffering countless losses. The bodies of the invaders are said to be buried within the towering dune bordering the left side of the dogleg-left, par-4 12th—hence the hole’s name, Cnoc na gCorp, Irish for “Hill of Corpses.” Their ghosts, while rarely sighted, are known to feast on pulled tee shots that disappear into one of the tallest golf dunes in the country. Better to move on to Enniscrone’s stunning stretch of closing holes than to spend time treading on the souls of the departed in search of your Titleist.

It’s unlikely that the course architects investigated the purported presence of bones in that dune when creating the layout. A real Irish legend—Dubliner Eddie Hackett—extended an original nine holes to 18 in 1974. Donal Steel conjured six new holes from the beguiling dunes in a 2001 renovation, deftly integrating them with Hackett’s existing work. The end result is a routing that has elevated Enniscrone to international acclaim, a course Shane Lowry regards as a true Irish treasure. “The best course in Ireland off the beaten track—it would get a few visitors but not many,” Lowry once remarked, “would be Enniscrone.” And he said as much without even having to bring up the pig.

It was large and black, so the storytellers say. Angry, too. Very angry. No one can say exactly when, but this maniacal swine went on a deadly rampage up in Donegal before fleeing into Sligo and then slipping into the sea to evade hunters. Legend holds that it then surfaced at Enniscrone. The Irish Independent wrote about the tale of this lethal marauder: “Apparently, a wild boar with magical powers and poisonous bristles rose up from the waters and ran riot through the village, killing everyone in its path,” the story went. “The people came together to kill the beast and buried it in a field in Muc Dubh. The mound is still here to this day and a sculpture of the Black Pig can be found across the road from the Diamond Coast Hotel, which backs onto the golf course.”

Indeed it is. But the hog’s legacy lives on beyond that statue: Enniscrone’s 18th hole is named Muckduff (“The Black Pig”) in homage to the beast. When played into the wind, the closing par 4 lives up to the swine’s nasty reputation, and its foursome of pot bunkers in the fairway can be bristly in their own right. There’s even a four-day Black Pig Festival held each summer in the seaside town. Celebrating a murderous demon with an extended party may seem an odd choice, but if you’ve ever been to an Irish wake, you know the locals here excel at finding revelry in unlikely circumstances.

Death doesn’t course through the veins of all the lore connected with Enniscrone. Take the Valley of Diamonds, the name affixed to the 14th, a par 5 best known for the behemoth of a dune down the left side of its fairway. Sadly, the name doesn’t refer to hidden treasure (of a financial kind, at least). Instead, it’s connected to the cockle shells that hug the ground in a basin formed by the back side of that dune. When the sunlight hits those shells at precisely the right angle, you might just think you are looking at a dazzling field of jewels. The best view of the Valley comes from the top of the massive sand hill overlooking it, but to protect this natural wonder from the threat of erosion, public access is no longer allowed.

The course, and specifically that dune, holds yet another connection to Irish legend. On a handful of occasions in the late 1990s and early 2000s, the Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) Senior football team, from neighboring County Mayo, would do some of its training there. The team would run along the beach, then sprint up and down the back side of the gargantuan dune. In some cases, players carried teammates on their backs as they climbed. If, and hopefully when, you play Enniscrone, take a moment on the 14th fairway to soak in the sheer size and angle of that sandy monstrosity, then imagine crawling up it with your playing partner on your back. Fair play to those lads from Mayo—let’s raise a pint and Mars bar in their honor.

But it was a dark moment from decades before, allegedly, that led to a legend affiliated with a previous Mayo team. As described by the BBC in a press release announcing “The Curse of County Mayo,” a three-part series on the topic for their World Service podcast Amazing Sport Stories, “On the 23 September 1951, County Mayo’s Gaelic football team had just won the sport’s most prestigious competition: The All Ireland championship. During their celebratory journey home, they passed a funeral and, apparently drunk on their success, forgot to stop and pay their respects—or at least that’s how the story goes. Legend has it that the priest presiding over the funeral set a curse on the team as punishment: ‘As long as you all shall live, County Mayo will never win another All-Ireland!’ Over the years, County Mayo’s team would lose final after final—cementing belief in the curse for many.”

While the power of the Catholic Church has waned in the country since those days, that curse has gained strength. Since the proclamation of that hex, the Mayo squad has gone on to appear in 11 All-Ireland finals at Croke Park in Dublin but come up on the losing end every time, most recently in 2021. To be fair, Mayo’s trio of All-Ireland titles, won pre-curse, is still more championships than 10 other counties can claim (including winless Laois, Antrim, Waterford, Clare, and Monaghan), but a lesson was learned. So if you find yourself passing a funeral on your way to the golf course, stop and say a prayer. You’re in for a long day otherwise.

Are all of these stories fact or folklore? I pondered that very question after my recent round at Enniscrone as I lay soaking in a sturdy tub at the nearby Kilcullen Seaweed Baths, opened in 1912. The legend there is that seaweed, culled daily from the shore across the street and placed in steaming-hot seawater, contains healing and restorative powers—something to do with its natural iodine level. Maybe. Maybe not. My legs, aching from ascending all of those dunes, sided with the former opinion that day.

But perhaps this was the wrong question to ask in Ireland, where embellishing any tale, modern or ancient, is both birthright and elevated art form. Instead, appreciate the craft of those telling them. Share them yourself. Believing them? That’s up to you. But I promise that regardless of where the truth really lies, you will nevertheless keep an eye out for mermaids, Vikings and pigs every time you roam the links of Enniscrone.