Explore Ireland’s Most Beautiful New Golf Destination
For fans of Irish golf, the name Waterville is synonymous with greatness. Now, five minutes from Waterville Golf Links, in County Kerry, Ireland, another club has joined the party. Hogs Head Golf Club is set to make the town of Waterville into even more of a golf destination. Overlooking scenic Ballinskelligs Bay, Hogs Head Golf Club comprises a Robert Trent Jones II–designed golf course—Jones’s first in Ireland. The 7,140-yard, par-72 headlands course features Atlantic Ocean views and tee-to-green fescue (grass cover). The property also features a 17,000-square-foot clubhouse, 48-guest-room lodge, and seven private, four-bedroom cottages. For the construction, owners Bryan Marsal and Tony Alvarez II enlisted Dublin-based architecture firm Henry J Lyons, as well as American designer Robert Rizzo of Cobble Court Interiors. From the start, the buildings at Hogs Head were designed to fit into the Irish landscape. “We started with the stone and the slate,” says Rizzo. “All the stone on the buildings is local Kerry stone.” The clubhouse, which was built first, proved a guiding force for the other buildings. Rizzo adds, “When we first designed the clubhouse, that material—the stone, the zinc gutters, the slate roofs, the glass and bronze—those were…