Sadness as Frankfield fairways close

You will not notice as you drive along Cork’s south ring road this New Year and pass beneath Frankfield Golf Club but up above, for members and owners alike, the emotions will be as raw as the morning chill.

January 1, 2015, marked the first time in 31 years that the hilly fairways of this southside course will lie out of bounds, its nine holes off limits, the club no longer affiliated to the Golfing Union of Ireland.

Rising costs, dwindling membership and sums that just don’t add up have caused Frankfield House owners, brothers Michael and Colman Ryan, to close the layout on which they had helped their father Mick mark out the fairways and plant trees back in the early 1980s. It is a course they can no longer afford to sustain, a lingering victim of the economic downturn that is still biting deep in the golf industry worldwide.