County Sligo Golf Club’s Heritage Group recently sat down together to trace the club’s story from its earliest days at Rosses Point right up to the present. The conversation covers everything from cannon fire on Bomore Head to Rory McIlroy’s first appearance at the club as a 15 year old, and it’s well worth a watch. You can view the full video here: youtu.be/5YwMQXu3YmM.
From Cannon Fire to a Golf Club
Long before the club existed, Bomore Head was used by three artillery regiments for target practice, including the Sligo Artillery under Colonel James Campbell. One of the group jokes that the only thing the cannons ever hit was the sea. Campbell and his fellow officers took up golf on the same ground, playing six informal holes on common land, with no surviving record of their layout.
Campbell later approached two Sligo businessmen, Arthur Jackson and his nephew, and in 1894 the three men called a meeting in Sligo Courthouse. That meeting formally established the County Sligo Golf Club. None of the three founders were accomplished golfers themselves, but the club grew quickly under their direction. George Combe, secretary of the Golfing Union of Ireland and a Royal County Down man, was brought in to design the first nine holes on the upper plateau. Within two months the club had close to 100 male members and 30 lady members.
The land itself was leased from the Middleton family of Coole, with William Butler Yeats connected to the family through marriage. The first lease ran for just a year before being extended by a further ten, on condition that Henry Middleton was made an honorary member, which finally happened around 1910.
Founding Figures and Early Members
The first meeting was convened by Colonel Campbell with Arthur Jackson and Harper Campbell Perry, and drew 96 founding members, 35 of whom belonged to the local Masonic lodge. Campbell also set up a leadership structure of one president and four vice presidents, choosing five of the wealthiest and most prominent men in Sligo: Colonel Cooper of Markree Castle as president, with his son Captain Cooper, Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth of Lissadell, MP Evelyn Ashley of Classiebawn, and a representative of the Wynne family of Hazelwood House serving as vice presidents. Between them the five owned over 100,000 acres in County Sligo.
Women were involved from the outset. Amy Ormsby was the club’s most prominent early lady golfer, winning the Irish Close Championship in 1909 before emigrating to South Africa, where she won the national championship four times, the last in 1934.
Designing the Course
The original six holes on Bomore Head gave way to George Combe’s nine-hole design on the upper plateau. In 1907, William Campbell, a stepbrother of Colonel James Campbell, added a further nine holes extending onto the lower plateau, bringing the course to eighteen holes. The most significant change came in 1927, when renowned course architect Harry Colt was invited to redesign the layout. Colt reversed the course from clockwise to anticlockwise play and reworked sixteen of the eighteen holes, with two of William Campbell’s holes surviving in the design still played today. The Heritage Group holds a series of letters between Colt and then general secretary Major Benson, including a handwritten note from Colt himself, which the club intends to put on display for visitors.
Interestingly, Colt and Campbell were both at Cambridge around the same time and would have played golf together there, with Colt reaching the final of the British Amateur.
The Bomore Course and Its Racing Past
Before it hosted golf, the Bomore side of the club was a racecourse, with meetings dating back to the 1700s. The very first recorded meeting in 1781 ran over three days with total prize money of 200 guineas, a substantial sum for the time. The racecourse later moved to Hazelwood before returning to Bomore for a further period that briefly overlapped with the golf club’s early years. The last race meeting was held in 1952, by which point the golf club had already fenced off the area to keep grazing cattle from straying onto the course. The land also served as an airfield at one stage.
Famous Names on the Links
Over the decades, County Sligo has welcomed a long list of golfing greats. Henry Cotton played an exhibition alongside Joe Carr, while Tom Watson and Byron Nelson played together at the club. Walter Hagen and Jean Sarazen also played here, and Nick Faldo, an honorary member, has visited many times. Bernhard Langer, Greg Norman and Bobby Locke, of the famous ‘ball in the bottle’ story with Harry Bradshaw, all played County Sligo in the late 1940s.
The club also has a strong literary connection. William Butler Yeats and his brother, the artist Jack B. Yeats, spent time in Rosses Point through their family ties to the Middletons and Pollexfens. Yeats’s reported affection for Constance Gore-Booth adds a further link, given that Sir Josslyn Gore-Booth was one of the club’s founding vice presidents. A set of hickory-shafted clubs from the Gore-Booth family, including one marked with the Gore-Booth name, survives in the club’s collection today.
The Clubhouse
Before the current clubhouse existed, members used Ewing’s Hotel across the road. The clubhouse itself was designed by George O’Connor in 1911 and built by James Kiernan in 1912, an early colonial-style building that still stands largely as it was despite its exposed position on the Atlantic coast. A shell motif near the top of the building is thought to reference the Irish meaning of Sligo, ‘Sligeach’, or shelly place. In the club’s early years there were separate entrances for men and women, and a sign on the lounge door once read ‘no dogs or children under 12’.
The West of Ireland Championship
One of the club’s proudest achievements is the West of Ireland Championship, first played in August 1923 and driven forward by Arthur Jackson Jr. Up until the early 1960s it was a straight match play event, dominated in its early decades by Cecil Ewing, Joe Carr and John Burke of Lahinch. Ewing played in 38 consecutive West of Irelands, winning ten times. Carr reached 12 finals and won every one of them, while Burke, better known for winning more than a dozen South of Ireland titles, also took six Wests.
The championship has produced eight future major winners, more than any other Irish amateur event. Padraig Harrington won his first senior title here in 1994, Rory McIlroy won his first senior championship at County Sligo in 2005 as a 15 year old, Shane Lowry followed in 2008, and Paul McGinley won the Irish Close at the club in 1989.
Cecil Ewing: A Golfing Life
Cecil Ewing’s record stands out even among that company. He played his first West of Ireland at 14, won it ten times, played 96 matches for Ireland and represented the country at six Walker Cups. He went on to serve as president of the Golfing Union of Ireland, captained Irish teams to European success, and sat as a Walker Cup selector. His standout moment came at the 1938 Walker Cup at St Andrews, where, after losing the British Amateur final to Charlie Yates, he holed a four foot putt in front of around 10,000 spectators to help secure the first ever Great Britain and Ireland Walker Cup win.
The Heritage Group also shared some personal memories, including the telegram inviting Ewing onto his first Walker Cup team, which arrived while he was away working and was read aloud in the family hotel bar before he could see it himself. His daughter recalled travelling to Cork to meet him off the boat afterwards, and letters from journalist Henry Longhurst noting that Ewing and fellow competitor Carr were among the only golfers able to finish their meals in post-war rationing conditions abroad.
Caddies, Locals and the Male Voice Choir
For much of the club’s history, local caddies were not permitted to become members, and many joined Strandhill Golf Club instead. That changed in 1958, when Dermot Gillan, himself a former caddy, and Rex Beattie pushed for the ban to be lifted. Local recruitment followed, including through the local schoolteacher, and by the 1960s Rosses Point locals were joining the club in growing numbers. The caddies had long had their own informal course laid out over parts of the original Combe design, played with borrowed or incomplete sets of clubs.
The club’s County Sligo Male Voice Choir began in 1993, formed after a spontaneous singalong with a visiting choir inspired member Don Gillan to start one of his own. It grew from an initial call for 24 singers to 28 within a couple of hours, ahead of the club’s centenary year in 1994. The choir went on to win the male voice section at the North Wales Coral Festival in Llandudno in 2001, and returned in 2008 to win both the male voice section and the overall choir of the tournament.
Watch the full conversation with the Heritage Group here: youtu.be/5YwMQXu3YmM
