Through all the changes of the years, Royal County Down has retained its essential character. The words of Bernard Darwin, that doyen of golf writers and no mean player himself, over seventy years ago still ring true: when he drew back the curtains of his hotel window to catch his first glimpse of the Mourne Mountains, he wrote that “to see Slieve Donard’s crest just emerging from a great sea of early mist is to taste one of the intenser joys of shaving on the morning of a workless day”. And regarding the great course which lay below the mountains, he added that it was one of “big and glorious carries, nestling greens, entertainingly blind shots, local knowledge and beautiful turf – the kind of golf that people play in their most ecstatic dreams”.