To give ourselves an acceptable chance of winning a St Andrews Old Course ballot we need to target the most productive days of the week. This would be Saturday followed by Thursday. At the very least therefore we need to be in St Andrews on Wednesday evening, and ideally before 16.30 so as to give ourselves a chance of contesting Thursday’s singles ballot

There is no play on Sunday, so it would be sensible to earmark this for Carnoustie so as to avoid any issues of a clash with our most difficult to rearrange course

This means we need cover for Thurs, Fri and Sat, so it’s quite normal to utilise Kingsbarns, Dumbarnie and the St Andrews New Course under the present-pay-and-play-on-the-day protocol, so as to avoid taking on a financial liability we couldn’t extricate ourselves from

Muirfield needs to be booked about 20 months in advance of play, so doesn’t feature in the best golf vacation possible as frequently as you feel it should, since not many golfers plan over this sort of horizon

In addition to this, Muirfield only permits visitor play on Tuesday and Thursday, and only then in multiples of four. Anything other than a fourball will be rejected

If we’ve already set one of our Thursday’s aside for St Andrews however, this usually means we have to try and ‘get’ Muirfield on a Tuesday, and usually look to play it alongside North Berwick on Wednesday (hopefully off a tee-time that allows us to get up to St Andrews by 16.30 that same afternoon)

It’s possibly worth recapping this

• Tues – Muirfield
• Weds – North Berwick
• Thurs – Kingsbarns
• Fri – Dumbarnie
• Sat – St Andrews New
• Sun – Carnoustie

So far we’ve been exclusively Scottish, but we’ve still got three big beasts from Ireland to secure, plus a diversion to the Scottish west coast or highlands

Dublin is likely our point of entry, and Portmarnock is only 20 mins from the airport

Portmarnock only permits visitor play on Mon, Tues, Thurs and Sun afternoons however

If we aim to play Muirfield on Tuesday (and this assumes we’re seeking to include Muirfield of course – which we might not be) then we’d need to be in Edinburgh on Monday evening

There are two ways of potentially doing this.

Playing Portmarnock on Sunday afternoon and Royal County Down on Monday morning, flying to Edinburgh on Monday evening

Playing Portmarnock on Monday and flying to Edinburgh later that same day

As we’re about to discover though, the day of the week we start on, will become increasingly critical in what we can frame

Along with Portmarnock, neither Royal County Down (RCD) or Royal Portrush permit visitor play on Wednesday. RCD doesn’t permit play on Saturday either. Both RCD and Portrush permit some limited visitor play on Sunday afternoons in tight difficult to land on, windows of opportunity. Both courses also operate various full and half day visitor schedules for the rest of the week.

The south to north sequence we’d look to play them in from Dublin would be Portmarnock > RCD > Portrush

With no Wednesday available it’s very difficult to string them together unless we miss Muirfield out, in which case we might be able to run:

• Sunday – Portmarnock
• Monday – RCD
• Tues – Portrush
• Weds – Fly Belfast to Edinburgh (North Berwick)

If we start at Portmarnock on a Thursday however, then we could play RCD on Friday, and hope to hit one of the late Saturday times at Portrush … or cut out at Belfast and come back for Portrush later

Belfast is halfway between Royal County Down and Royal Portrush. It is the pivot point from which decisions are launched from

Belfast has connecting flights to:

• Edinburgh – for Muirfield & North Berwick
• Glasgow – for Troon & Turnberry
• Inverness – for Royal Dornoch & Castle Stuart

It also has a carry ferry from Belfast to Cairnryan, which door-to-door at least, is quicker for Turnberry than flying to Glasgow. The big drawback to the ferry is it can lead us onto expensive one-way vehicle hires of a Dublin pick up, and  Edinburgh return (unless we’re somehow able to get it back to Dublin). Not many hire companies will sanction this particular arrangement anyway.

As we’re going to discover, the day of the week we arrive in Belfast, which itself is a product of the day of week we begin in Dublin, becomes critical

This traces back to Portmarnock. It’s perhaps worth looking at the four options

Portmarnock, on Monday = RCD on Tues, and then we need to transfer if we’re to avoid losing a dead day on Weds. We can’t easily play Muirfield this way, so our options would be Dornoch on Weds and Castle Stuart on Thurs, or Turnberry on Weds and Troon on Thurs. Either way we’ve encroached onto our sweet spot for St Andrews. It’s not a great choice

Portmarnock on Tuesday = no Northern Irish course on Weds. We have to fly to Scotland on Weds, which probably means North Berwick and whizzing around to St Andrews, or Turnberry on Weds and Troon Thurs, with the same drawback in St Andrews we noted for Monday. We also need to construct a way to get back to Belfast for Portrush and RCD. Again, it’s difficult to work up too much enthusiasm for this as well

Portmarnock on Thursday = This is potentially a good fit if it leads to RCD on Friday, Portrush on Saturday afternoon, and then Turnberry on Sunday afternoon, and Troon on Monday morning. It allows us to then follow with the Muirfield Tuesday and North Berwick Wednesday arrangement described earlier. The key tee-time though is that Saturday afternoon at Portrush. It’s a narrow window to land on

There is a variant to this which would allow us to fly to Inverness on Sunday to play Castle Stuart, and then Royal Dornoch on Monday. The line of travel this would set up probably leads us onto Carnoustie for Tuesday, which releases Weds to Sat for our St Andrews assault. This gets a bit messy on the second Sunday though.

The only course we could play would be North Berwick in the afternoon, but because we can’t play Muirfield until Tuesday, we’d have to wait, so the Monday and Wednesday become fill. We could play Troon on Monday as a day trip, then Muirfield Tuesday, but do we really want to go back to Turnberry on Wednesday. Perhaps the cleaner way of doing this is Troon Monday, Turnberry Tuesday, Prestwick Wednesday, and finish at Muirfield on Thursday

Portmarnock on Sunday afternoon, = RCD on Monday morning and a transfer to Edinburgh that evening to set up Muirfield, with North Berwick, and then the run from Kingsbarns on Thursday to Carnoustie on Sunday. The problem this presents is that its now Monday morning and we’re in Carnoustie. We want to get Portrush back into the book, but if we aim at Troon Monday afternoon and Turnberry on Tuesday afternoon, we’ll land at Portrush on a Wednesday (no visitor play). Prestwick is an option to engineer an arrival for Thursday

Instead of going to Edinburgh on the first Monday afternoon, a better flow might be to fly to Inverness on Tuesday morning to play Royal Dornoch on Tuesday afternoon, and Castle Stuart on Wednesday morning. This flips the direction of travel. Carnoustie would now fall on Thursday, Dumbarnie on Friday, St Andrews New Course on Saturday, and Kingsbarns on Sunday. The Lothian leg then begins at the start of the new week with North Berwick on Monday, and Muirfield on Tuesday, followed by Turnberry on Wednesday, and Troon on Thursday (flying to Belfast that evening) to set up Portrush on Friday.

Yes, but before we tackle this, it might be worth reminding ourselves of what we previously called ‘the core’

• Tues – Muirfield
• Weds – North Berwick
• Thurs – Kingsbarns
• Fri – Dumbarnie
• Sat – St Andrews New
• Sun – Carnoustie

If we land in Glasgow (we could make Edinburgh work too but it’s a bit further away) then we could start on the Ayrshire Coast

Turnberry would be Sunday afternoon and Troon on Monday morning.

We’d then need to get to Ireland on the second Monday, but with three courses in our cross-hairs, none of which permit visitor play on a Wednesday, we’re always going to be a day wrong

We either omit Portmarnock, or we introduce a non-golf day in Dublin on Wednesday

Driving from Carnoustie to play Castle Stuart on Monday and Royal Dornoch on Tuesday, and then flying to from Inverness to Belfast on Wednesday is possible, but we still couldn’t play on Wednesday. We’d have to finish with Portrush on Thursday, RCD on Friday, a non-golf day in Dublin on Saturday, and finally at Portmarnock on Sunday afternoon

As the duration extends, the intensity becomes more demanding. Can we legitimately use some non-golf days to draw some of the sting and orchestrate landing on the right courses on the preferred days?

It’s a fair question since we have some perfectly viable options including

• Dublin
• Edinburgh
• The Highlands (Culloden & Loch Ness)
• The Antrim Coast (Giants Causeway & Carrick u Rede)

In broad terms there are two ways of doing this

A point-to-point tour is what it sounds like, and usually involves transfers by plane and separate car hires

An out-and-back tour is more complex and more suitable to the car ferry from Belfast to Cairnryan, as we need to get the vehicle back to Dublin.

Rather than playing courses in groups of two, we play one of them on the outward leg, and the other one on the return leg. Courses that might fall under this would be North Berwick with Muirfield, Turnberry with Troon and RCD with Portrush

• Sun = Portmarnock
• Mon = RCD
• Tues = Troon
• Weds = Prestwick
• Thursday = Kingsbarns
• Friday = Dumbarnie
• Saturday = St Andrews New
• Sunday = Carnoustie
• Monday = North Berwick
• Tuesday = Muirfield
• Wednesday = Turnberry
• Thursday = Portrush

Flights from Shannon to Scotland simply aren’t frequent enough. Although it is possible to include Lahinch and Ballybunion (neither of whom allow weekend play just to make things more difficult) we usually find that in order to include them we’ll need to drop another block.

If the flights between Shannon and Edinburgh don’t fall kindly (and they usually won’t) then we’ll either need to fly from Cork, or drive across the country to fly from Dublin. This can even eat up a day ‘transferring’ which is often a poor use of limited time

We don’t normally encourage people to try and combine West Ireland with Scotland in the pursuit of the best golf vacation possible, but there is an option to do so

Trying to assemble the best Golf Vacation possible is difficult. There are a lot of moving parts to get a perfect full house, and a lot of ‘noise’ in the architecture.

There is usually a way of getting very close to it though

The whole thing usually hinges on the following

• The courses we want to play
• The duration we can set aside
• The amount of mileage we’re prepared to do

Irish and Scottish combo’s are increasingly popular, they’re also some of the most complex to assemble. Rather than trying to do it off a web-site, it’s a lot better to have us work up a specific proposal and stress test it out fully etc