Team Niblick and Tom Watson Design have collaborated on renovation work to fulfil the potential of Robert Trent Jones’ 1982 routing at the Irish club. Toby Ingleton reports
Ballybunion Golf Club on Ireland’s south-west coast is ready to fully reopen its Cashen course, following three winters of renovation work that has seen every hole completely overhauled. The project has been a collaboration between the club, architecture firms Team Niblick and Tom Watson Design, and contractor Atlantic Golf Construction.
Set immediately south of the club’s famed Old course, and occupying even more dramatic dunes, the Cashen was laid out by Robert Trent Jones and opened in 1982. At the time, he described the site as “the finest piece of linksland that I had ever seen, and perhaps the finest piece of linksland in the world”. Jones was in his 70s and reportedly took to a donkey to survey the land. “The boldness and variation of this terrain made it not an easy piece of land upon which to route a golf course,” he said. “But, it was done, and you will play eighteen spectacular holes, each with its own beauty and challenge. There is no similarity on any holes on the course. There are no weak holes on the course.”
The dunes upon which the Cashen course lies are perhaps even more dramatic than those of the Old course at Ballybunion (Photo: Kieran Ryan-Benson)
Working with a budget that limited the scope of the project, Jones was clear at the time that more work would be required to fulfil the course’s potential. “I left you a rough diamond here; it’s up to people in future to look at it and polish the diamond.”
Buoyed by five-time Open champion Tom Watson’s proclamation in the 1980s that “nobody can call himself a golfer until he has played at Ballybunion”, the club’s status and resources have grown since the Cashen course was laid out. In 2016, after completing a project on the Old course that included the rebuilding of all greens, it was time to make the Cashen gem sparkle.
Having considered input from several design firms, members voted to proceed with a joint proposal from Team Niblick’s Graeme Webster – who had overseen the latest work on the Old – and Tom Watson Design, represented by Watson and golf course architect Bob Gibbons.
The renovation of the Cashen course was a collaboration between, from left, Graeme Webster of Team Niblick, and Tom Watson and Bob Gibbons of Tom Watson Design (Photo: Kieran Ryan-Benson)
The Cashen had become known as an uncompromising test. Golfers were frequently faced with an all-or-nothing challenge: either pull off a heroic shot from one point on the dunes to another, or wave goodbye to your score. The proposal drawn up by Webster, Watson and Gibbons centred around the desire to make the course playable and enjoyable for all standards of golfer, which would involve providing more opportunities to play the ball along the ground.
At the same time, the club committed to a 20 per cent increase in natural habitat on the Cashen. Working alongside environmental consultants, boundaries were established beyond which there would be no disturbance.
The redesign therefore needed to achieve sometimes conflicting requirements of playability and environmental responsibility. This balancing act would present agronomic challenges too. Course manager John Bambury explains: “Pinch points are not good for fescue. To remain within the disturbance boundaries, we had to take great care with how we tied our green sites into the dunes, so that transitions were natural, the course was playable and the turf would be healthy.”
Greens remain broadly in the same locations, but “their scale, contours and relationship with the surrounding landforms have been fundamentally changed”, says Webster. “They are now significantly larger, averaging almost 550 square metres and have been designed as complete green sites, with the putting surfaces and surrounds working together as one strategic composition.”
Gibbons’ notes for the tenth and seventeenth holes (Image: Tom Watson Design)
The previous greens were generally small with pinched entrances. Even very good players could struggle to hold them, particularly with a tailwind. “The redesign has opened up approaches, creating more options into the greens and restoring a stronger ground game element to the course,” says Webster. “In addition there were no meaningful surrounds to speak of on the old greens – a shot missing the tightly defined targets would often finish up against the face of a dune embankment, leaving little opportunity for recovery.”
The redesign has addressed this and the Cashen now provides a stringent test of the short game. Swales, ridges and hollows blend naturally into the putting surfaces, creating more varied green complexes with a greater range of recovery options.
Several green sites have also been significantly lowered, “helping them sit more comfortably within the surrounding dune landscape and improving the quality of approach play,” says Webster.
The drop-shot par-three sixth hole and short par-four seventh, which plays back up the dunes (Photo: Kieran Ryan-Benson)
The design team has made just one tweak to Jones’ routing, switching the fifth and seventh holes. This eliminates the need for a long walk between the seventh green and eighth tees, while also meaning the first visit to the wild Atlantic coast comes a little earlier in the round. The short par-four that is now the fifth (main photo) runs alongside the ocean to a long, narrow green where moving the pin from front to back can add close to fifty yards to the length of the hole.
The preceding hole provides perhaps the most iconic view on the course. A par four from an elevated tee, the fourth plays towards the mouth of the river that gives the course its name. The backdrop changes with the tide, and is a picture of Ireland that could be lifted straight from the pages of a travel brochure.
The fourth hole on the Cashen is one of the most picturesque at Ballybunion (Photo: Kieran Ryan-Benson)
Those who played the Cashen before the renovation are as likely to remember the fourth for a steep, dead-straight gravel path from the teeing area to fairway and was something of a scar on the landscape. Thankfully there is now a replacement that snakes more discretely down the hillside. All pathways have been rebuilt; the club considered grass surfaces, like those that have been so well received on the Old, but opted for robust and lower maintenance tar paths that would better withstand traffic from members and guests who choose to navigate the challenging landscape in a cart – a mode of transport that Jones may have preferred to the donkey.
Jones highlighted the variety of the holes at Cashen, but equally striking is the ebb and flow of his routing; from that visit to the river, then ocean, then back inland, returning to the clubhouse after nine. Hole ten heads directly back towards the coast for a back nine that has sea views on most holes. One of the design team’s objectives was to give the course “a greater connection with the ocean”, and this has been achieved by finding opportunities on the inland holes to offer glimpses of the sea through gaps in the dunes. While the three holes that sit directly on the coast – five, sixteen and seventeen – may be the most exhilarating, and most exposed to the elements, there are plenty of moments in the round where you can pause for breath and feel somewhat sheltered, and those have as much charm as the coastal holes have drama.
One is the thirteenth, a mid-length par four protected by huge dunes either side of the fairway, that tumbles down and then rises back up towards the green. This hole also exemplifies the design team’s work on approaches – any ball veering right was previously liable to fall away into a deep area of native grass, whereas a reshaped approach means there is now every chance the ball will remain in play, with a multitude of options for getting it onto the green.
Greens and surrounds have been completely redesigned, as seen here on the first hole, creating more options and a strong ground game element (Photo: Kieran Ryan-Benson)
The club had originally planned to do work over six seasons, but accelerated the programme to get it completed in three. Atlantic Golf Construction’s Anthony Bennett and brother Donald, locals who grew up playing Ballybunion and whose father was involved in the Cashen’s original build, mobilised the resources that would allow this to happen. They know the dunes as well as anyone and were well prepared for the inevitable battle of keep shaping work intact when high winds had other plans.
Countless golfers have crossed an ocean for a round on Ballybunion’s Old course, many of whom did not then walk a few more yards to play the Cashen. That would seem like an inconceivable decision now. The redesign of the Cashen was focused squarely on members’ requirements, but visiting guests would be mad to pass it by.
Watson says: “Now, with our enhancement of the stunning, majestic views of both the Cashen River and the vast expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, you will come away with an inspired sense of what links golf is all about.”
This article first appeared in the July 2026 issue of Golf Course Architecture. For a printed subscription or free digital edition, please visit our subscriptions page.