PHILIP REIDasks you to scour the finest inland golf courses in Ireland and conjure up the circuit of your dreams

WHAT MAKES a great golf hole? In designing an eclectic fantasy parkland course, what would Dr Alister Mackenzie – arguably the greatest designer the game has known – have put at the top of his list? For sure, you can bet that he’d want each hole to have a different character. For sure, he’d respect the challenge presented for the approach shots to Par 4s? And you can bet your bottom dollar he would want it to be an enjoyable experience.

So, here’s the challenge we present to you: come up with your fantasy parkland course, an eclectic mix of the very best inland holes to be found, with the only criteria being you must place each hole – 1 to 18 – in the same position that it occupies on its home course.

How do you go about it? It’s up to you. There is no magic formula, no requirement to have a Par of 72 or a necessity to have a course that features 10 Par 4s, four Par 5s and four Par 3s.

Don’t worry if there are back-to-back Par 3s or Par 5s.

No, the only requirement is to come up with Ireland’s greatest 18 holes of parkland golf.

Different people see and expect different things, which is why there is so much debate as to where and what are the great holes of golf. Beauty is very much in the eye of the beholder, and the challenge that each hole presents to the golfer standing on the tee varies from hole-to-hole and place to place.

Some holes are brutishly long. Others are drivable Par 4s with their own challenges.

The vast majority of golf course development in Ireland in the past two decades has focused on developing new parkland courses. Some have been built on cliff tops, others created through mature forests and on great country estates, but most have been built on what was once farmland, with much earth moving to shape a new identity.

Where does this all fit in with the old, traditional parkland courses with great history? Indeed, many of those old parkland courses have been given facelifts in recent times so as to move with the times and keep apace with the advances in technology.

Is it possible to mix and match the best from the past with the present? It’s easy to be a critic of the type of parkland courses that have come our way, arguing that they are too Americanised and don’t always fit in with what Irish golf is all about. But the counter argument is that many of these holes are very much at home in an Irish setting; and some course architects have also gone out of their way to use drumlins and fairy forts – very much part of the Irish landscape – in providing holes that are uniquely ours.