How To Plan Three Days Around Waterville

Day One: Arrive Late, Eat In The Village, Do Nothing Else

Come in over the Ring in the afternoon rather than the morning, and give the drive the respect it deserves. Whether you approach from Killarney and Kenmare in the south or from Killorglin and Cahersiveen in the north, the road is single carriageway with coaches on it, and the urge to make time is the urge that ruins the day. Stop at Coomakista above Derrynane and look back down the coast. That view is the reason people take this road and it costs you ten minutes.

Check in and stop. Waterville is a village of one street facing the water, and the correct first evening is a walk along the seafront and dinner where you are staying. The Butler Arms has been the social centre of the village for a century and its bar is where the golf conversation happens. The Smuggler's Inn sits out towards the links with the sea in front of it. Neither of them publishes fixed opening hours we are willing to quote, so call ahead on the drive in, particularly outside July and August.

Do not play golf on day one. The temptation on a long summer evening is to get nine holes in after the drive, and on a course that asks for concentration on the second nine it is a waste of a green fee. Arrive, eat, sleep.

Day Two: The Round, With A Caddie, In The Morning

Take a morning tee time. The Iveragh Peninsula is one of the calmer stretches of the Kerry coast and the wind here is usually softer than it is at Ballybunion or Tralee, but softer is a relative word on an Atlantic edge, and the afternoon is reliably firmer than the morning. A ten o'clock start gives you a calm front nine and puts you out at the far corner of the property around the eleventh and twelfth when the light is still high.

Request a caddie when you book, not on the day. The front nine at Waterville is receptive and will let you believe you have the course solved. The back nine is the harder half by a clear margin and the walk out to the eleventh is where the round is decided. A caddie who knows how the estuary wind funnels through that corner is the difference between a good score and a card you tear up on the sixteenth.

Come off the eighteenth and stay put. The clubhouse looks down the links toward the water and there is no reason to hurry away from it. Walk over to the Payne Stewart statue at the range afterwards, which is the closest thing this course has to a shrine and which most visitors photograph without stopping to read. Then take the afternoon off entirely.

Day Three: The Skellig Ring, Derrynane, And The Boat If You Are Lucky

Day three is the one that turns the trip from a golf trip into a Kerry trip, and it is also the day that keeps the non-golfers in the party happy enough to agree to the next one. Three options, in descending order of ambition. The boat out to Skellig Michael, the monastic rock eight miles offshore, is the finest half day in Ireland and the least reliable: landings are weather-dependent, the season is short, and operators cancel more often than visitors expect. If it sails, take it and cancel everything else.

If it does not sail, drive the Skellig Ring, the smaller loop that branches off the main Ring of Kerry road and that the coaches cannot take. It runs through Ballinskelligs and Portmagee and over the Coomanaspic pass to Valentia Island, and it is the most dramatic hour of driving on the peninsula. Skelligs Chocolate sits along that road and is a genuinely good stop rather than a tourist obligation.

The third option, and the one we take most often on a wet morning, is Derrynane House, the home of Daniel O'Connell, run by Heritage Ireland and set in gardens above one of the best beaches in Kerry. It is fifteen minutes from Waterville, it explains more about nineteenth-century Ireland in an hour than any museum in Dublin, and the walk out to Abbey Island at low tide is quiet in a way the Ring of Kerry rarely is.

The Second Round, If You Want One

Groups who want thirty-six holes in three days have one obvious answer and one better one. The obvious answer is to play Waterville twice, which is defensible on a course this good and which the club will accommodate if the sheet allows. The better answer, for a group who wants variety, is Dooks Golf Club on the north side of the peninsula near Glenbeigh. It is an old links, considerably shorter, laid across dunes above Dingle Bay, and it is one of the rounds in Ireland we are fondest of rather than one of the grand ones.

Dooks costs a fraction of Waterville and it sits on the road you will drive anyway if you are heading north afterwards to Tralee or Ballybunion. Confirm its rates and visitor times directly with the club, since we do not quote figures we have not read on a club's own page for the season you are travelling in.

What The Weather Actually Does To This Plan

The honest thing to say about a three-day plan at the end of the Ring of Kerry is that it has to survive weather, and ours is built to. The round is on the middle day for a reason: if the middle day is unplayable, you still have the third morning to move it to, and the club is more likely to find you a slot than to refund you anything. Put the golf in the middle and you have a spare day. Put it on the last morning and you have nothing.

The second reason for the middle day is the Skellig boat. Landings on Skellig Michael depend on sea state rather than on rain, and operators cancel with little notice. If the boat is sailing on your third morning, you want to be free to take it. If it has already cancelled twice and sails on the second, you want to be able to move the golf. Keeping both plans loosely held for the first twenty four hours after you arrive is worth more than any amount of pre-booking.

What we would not do is plan around sunshine. The Iveragh Peninsula in June will give you four seasons in a round and the light after a squall clears over Ballinskelligs Bay is the reason photographers come here. Pack for it properly: a genuine waterproof, a second pair of golf shoes, and a change of trousers in the car. A group that is dressed for the weather has a completely different trip from one that is waiting for it to improve.

Where To Sleep, Honestly Compared

Waterville House is the club's own eighteenth-century house on the estuary and it is the choice we make when we can get it. You are inside the property, a short walk from the first tee, and eating alongside other people who are here for the same reason. It is small, which is the whole appeal and also the reason June and September go early.

The Butler Arms is the village hotel on the seafront, the place Charlie Chaplin returned to for a decade, and it is the more sociable option. If your party includes non-golfers who want to be able to walk out of the front door into a village rather than onto an estate, this is the answer. The Smuggler's Inn is the third, smaller option, closer to the links with rooms looking at the sea.

The alternative most American groups actually choose is to base in Kenmare or Killarney and drive in. We understand it and we would still argue against it for a first visit. If your itinerary genuinely cannot hold two nights at the end of the peninsula, base in Kenmare rather than Killarney, because it is meaningfully closer and it is the better town for dinner.

The Shape, In Short

Drive in during the afternoon of day one and do nothing. Play in the morning of day two with a caddie you requested at the time of booking, then take the afternoon off. Give day three to the Skellig boat if it sails, the Skellig Ring if it does not, and Derrynane either way. Add Dooks on the way north if the group wants a second round. Book the rooms before you release the green fee, because the green fee at Waterville is not refundable and the rooms at the end of the Ring are finite.

We would add one caution about direction of travel. If you are coming from Kenmare in the south and leaving north toward Killorglin, you will drive the Ring the way the coaches drive it, which means meeting them head on in the narrow sections. Going the other way puts them behind you. It is a small thing that makes a two-hour drive noticeably calmer, and no guidebook mentions it because it only matters if you are driving yourself.

And if the group is larger than a fourball, hire a driver for the two travel days rather than the whole trip. The roads on the Iveragh Peninsula are not difficult, but they are narrow, and a group of eight in two rental cars on the Coomanaspic pass in rain is a version of this trip nobody enjoys. We would rather spend the money there than on a second round.