Yardage Book: No. 6 at Cruit Island Golf Club

No. 6/15
Par 3, 150 yards/158 yards
Architect
Michael Doherty (1986) 

—Just a Number

Farther and further: The former denotes distance; the latter refers to degree. But they feel interchangeable at Cruit Island, where you go farther to go further, until you find yourself staring at an ocean chasm with a 7-iron in your hand, and physical distance blends with degrees of courage. Yards become emotions. Carry ceases to be a number and feels more like an ambition. Farther and further: There’s no difference in Donegal.

You’ve traveled far to arrive in Ireland, then a little farther to reach the edge of its most remote corner. You’ve piloted your way across one-lane bridges and edged your tires along deep bogland, arriving but not quite there. You’re in a land of a few more miles, always a few more, until a painted rock announces you’ve made it. Almost. Honk your horn for the players hitting drives over the entry road, and park yourself at what must be the end of Ireland. But as you study the islands hiding behind the islands, they tell you: Not just yet.

A little farther to the first tee, behind the clubhouse, then five more holes until you find it, No. 6 at Cruit Island, a par 3 where your rangefinder feels like a telescope and the distance on the tee marker looks more like art than math. Numbers succumb to sea spray and a small plate of grass in the distance that you might find with any of the clubs you’re carrying. Strategy gets no space on the sixth. You can’t think your way across this hole; all you can do is grasp at what might be far enough.

And if a whale got stuck here, you wonder, what chance has my ball got?

—Local Leviathan

“The par 3, the sixth, the par 3, the sixth,” says club president Joseph Gillespie, as if the hole has earned an incantation. “Everybody comes and leaves here talking about the par 3, the sixth.”

It’s not much to look at on the scorecard: 150 yards on your first go around this nine-holer, then 158 when you play it as the 15th from a higher tee. From either box, the goal is plain, and what some would call the best par 3 in Ireland can be summed up in a few syllables: Get it across. No angles to ponder, no bounces to anticipate—just be sure you can find your ball for a second shot, which leaves one wondering how a hole of such straightforward challenge can leave so many so impressed. Then you play it and understand that some holes transcend the actual playing of them. When a hole has been carved by millions of years of crashing whitewater, the golf you play across it feels wonderfully irrelevant. Still, it would be nice to walk away with a 3.

Columba Bonner is a former club president and has been playing at Cruit Island (pronounced crutch or critch) for decades. His family connection to the area goes back generations, so, after raising his own brood in Dublin, he settled on nearby Inishinny Island. His eyes hold a knowing glint, and his northern accent has a deep Donegal bottom, and you’re lucky to have him walking with you; he knows every shot and every story attached to the islands that spread out from Cruit like a constellation. He tells you about the whale and the sixth, and you’re in the mood to believe every word.

“It was about three years ago, a minke whale, about 30 feet in size. It had beached nearby, and the tide somehow washed it into one of the sea caves, and it ended up stuck here below the tee,” he explains. Between tee and green, Cruit Island’s signature hole crosses three sandy inlets where water crashes through gaps in the rocks at high tide—just enough passage for a whale carcass to get stuck with no way out.

“The local authority arrived down with about 10 trucks and four machines and 20 men, and they all looked down at it and maintained they didn’t have enough machinery to sort it out,” Bonner goes on. “We had one of the lads here who’s a fisherman, and so we were going to get a boat down there and try and get a rope in and tow the whale out with the tide. But on a Sunday night, after about three or four days, the whale just disappeared. He was gone. The tide had taken him.”

Columba Bonner (left, pointing), a former club president whose family has been in Donegal for generations, knows every way to get around the harrowing sixth hole (right). 

—Scratching Out Par

Cruit Island is located in an Irish-speaking pocket of Donegal (areas known as Gaeltacht regions), and its signs give each hole a name in Irish. Some of them are indiscernible to visitors, but you don’t need to have studied Irish to figure out No. 6: An Cat. The whale might have escaped, but the cat has been looking on for centuries and has judged every tee ball ever struck here. Just to your right, you see it: Balanced upon one of the rocky outcroppings, a black stone has taken the shape of a feline, and when the tide hits the right level, it looks as if a housecat is sitting there atop the waves.

Bonner explains that the nearest inlet on No. 6 once was topped by a natural sea arch across which children would play, running from one sea stack to the other. “There was a group here playing one afternoon, and the arch was there when they went around their first nine,” he says. “And when they got back, the bridge was gone, fallen into the tide.”

You’ve asked around the clubhouse about the best way to play the sixth, and the consensus is “anywhere on or near the green.” You’ve been told it can play from 3-wood to pitching wedge, depending on the gale. You fear that overswinging could send you off the cliff’s edge, but Bonner pulls you over and whispers some insight, because he knows you didn’t come to the sixth merely to survive it.

“There’s a landing spot, but it’s small, and it’s the bottom-left corner of the green here. If you can land on that, just inside the bunker on the left, it kicks straight towards the pin,” he explains. 

You do as you’re told—7-iron in today’s light breeze—and find a spot on the top left that kicks your ball rightward, where it holds on the top portion of the green. You’re told the green used to have no grab to it; a severe front-to-back slope was softened a few years ago after the green was wrecked by winter storms. Still, one of your playing partners comes up short and rolls back down the front. His caddie, Johndy, pleads with him to get his chip past the pin, so he knocks a hard wedge that rolls through the green, turns off a backstop and settles neatly by the hole. You both walk away with par, and Bonner tells you that those two shots are all you need to know about how to play the sixth.

—Something Better

You’re not sure the course can get any more compelling, but with Bonner narrating, the 5,600 yards of Cruit Island swell with lore and history. No. 7 is a short par 4 that plays along the water and down into a valley before leaping upward to a perched and blind green. Bonner explains that its name, the Well of Tears, dates back to the days when this beach cove was where residents of neighboring Owey Island would have seen, for the last time, their friends and family members sailing away to America.

You noticed Owey when you pulled into the parking lot. Directly across from the one-room clubhouse, it’s a small island dotted with a few dozen homes—some freshly painted, others broken piles of stone—where, Bonner says, a few residents still live year-round on generator power, though most just visit on their holidays. The island is accessible only by a short boat trip, and the pier sits below the clubhouse. Bonner recalls a friend of his father’s who was sent by the parish priest to go teach in the small schoolhouse on Owey.

“There were no phone lines or electricity running there, so he asked the priest how the island people would know how to come get him. He was told to just stand on one of these hillocks, and someone will come over in their currach [a small boat] and collect him. So he came down and stood on one way up there,” Bonner says, pointing to one of the dozen rises along the edge of No. 7. “He waited, and he waited, and nothing happened. Then he ran over to another one. He stood there for a while, and nothing happened. He moved around four or five of them. Of course, next thing, a whole flotilla of currachs came out of the island to collect him. The thing was, each hillock designated a different household on the island, so when you stood on one, that’s how they knew who you were coming to see. That was the communication.”

Owey’s name translates roughly to “island of the caves,” and Bonner tells you about the hundreds of sea caves that surround it—and about the kayaker who got stuck in one a few years back when the tide rose. His life was saved when a passing fisherman pulled him out. Bonner points to another island, with a fort that dates to the time of Napoleon, and another, Arranmore, whose inhabitants went on to make some history in America. Arranmore was at your back when you teed off the first, and Bonner describes how its residents left during Ireland’s Great Famine and settled on Beaver Island in Lake Michigan. Beaver Island was home to a splinter Mormon community led by James Jesse Strang, who crowned himself king and ran afoul of the arriving Irish, who hadn’t come to America to be ruled by another monarch. The story goes that they helped drive the king from his castle, so to speak, and the two islands officially were twinned in 2000, with Arranmore folk traveling to Michigan to celebrate their bond.

Cruit Island’s golf history is far younger than the stories that inhabit its surroundings. Bonner says the club got its start thanks to a man named Tony Boyle, a local businessman who died in 2022 at the age of 86. Boyle had maintained a four-hole course beside the beach in nearby Keadue for friends and family, but he had his eye on something better for the community. The local bishop owned some land on which they could fit a golf course, and after Boyle and some founding members signed a 99-year lease, the Cruit Island Golf Club opened in 1986. 

“There was no machinery whatsoever used in the construction,” Bonner says. “Tony had a wee engineering works over the road, you see. And they were lucky enough to get what [was then] called a Youth Employment [Support] Scheme. So you got a lot of young lads out here working on the course. They lifted all the sod—it was all cut by hand—and they took it away and used it for benching and banking and tees. Tony used to bring home the shovels and the spades with him every evening and sharpen them up for the young fellas the next morning to go.”

Cruit Island’s routing was planned by Michael Doherty, a golf pro from City of Derry Golf Club in Donegal’s neighboring county, though it’s hard to draw a line between his and Boyle’s work on the course. The routing has evolved, and holes have been reconfigured. And given the view that a hole like No. 6 presents, it’s hard to award design credit to anything other than the tides.

Bonner does point to the women of Cruit Island for the place becoming accessible to the likes of you and your golfing friends. “Back in the 19th, early 20th century, there was no bridge to the island,” he says. “And the local bishop happened to be down here where the bridge is now, reading his missal. Now, a wee ferryboat used to take people over and back, but if the tide was low, the ladies would lift up their skirts and walk across the tide. And the bishop was so horrified by this that he insisted they build a footbridge in order to preserve the modesty of the ladies of Cruit Island.”

—Left Wanting

Back in the clubhouse, a member named Eugene tells you how much the place has changed in fewer than 40 years. “Things have grown tenfold for us,” he says. “I remember when 20 players would have been a big member event for us, but now we’re disappointed if we don’t get 80.” 

He explains how the lure of better-known links at Rosapenna and Narin & Portnoo have brought in more visitors, and some celebrity shine hasn’t hurt, either. Honorary member Packie Bonner, the Irish goalie who led Ireland’s World Cup charge in 1990, is a national hero who started his football career next door in Keadue, and crooner Daniel O’Donnell hails from just over the bridge and still draws a crowd when he’s spotted playing the course. But you can’t help but think of the role peace has played in bringing more golfers up to Donegal, and there’s proof around the course that times in the north of Ireland have very much changed.

Lighted concrete pillars dot the edge of the rocks around Cruit, guiding boats to safe passage, but you notice that some of them are pockmarked with what look like bullet holes. In a quieter voice, Bonner explains that those posts would have been used as practice targets by IRA fighters back in the 1970s and ’80s. They were safe here, with no homes nearby; aside from the houses on Owey Island, which didn’t have telephone service, there was no way for anyone to inform on what they were doing. 

As a northern county that remained part of the Republic and not the neighboring British territory of Northern Ireland, Donegal’s place in the push for Irish independence has been complicated. “Most people here would consider themselves nationalist or republican,” Bonner explains, “but that doesn’t necessarily mean they would support the armed conflict, if you know what I mean.” It is involved, and he wants you to infer that wanting independence for Ireland doesn’t mean supporting violence—unless one did, and if one did, it’s better left unsaid. Much less murky is how the detente has been a boon for Donegal.

“The peace process has been massive for this area,” he explains. “Before the peace, when I would bring my family up from Dublin for holidays or a long weekend, we’d have to cross the border twice and go through two [British] army checkpoints, and they could keep you there for two or three hours, just for badness. No more, thank God. It’s made a huge difference.” 

The Good Friday Agreement of 1998 forged the peace long represented in the Irish flag: green for Catholic Ireland, orange for Protestant Ireland (which celebrates King William of Orange) and white for unity between the two. But the treaty didn’t ban a little humor, and you’re still chuckling from when Bonner pointed out the green artificial turf used at Cruit to cover the cart paths. “This came from a [field] hockey pitch in Belfast. From a Protestant hockey club. We joke that they tore it up because they didn’t care for the color,” he’d smiled. “They’d have preferred if it was orange.”

They sell you a pin flag at the bar, which doubles as the pro shop. It has the club logo and a “6” stitched into it, but it isn’t a replica; it’s an actual flag from the hole you came to see, its edges tattered and seams undone by the wind. You arrived here thinking you knew what you would find: a great one-shotter, a hole your playing partner just called the best par 3 he’s ever played. But your thoughts are with a schoolteacher and a kayaker and a cat, with families waving to leaving ships and a colony of Irish rebels in Michigan. You’ve been around Cruit Island twice, but you are ready to go again and then again, wondering what you might have missed, wanting another look, because when you’ve come this far, the only direction you feel is farther.