My arrival the night before at the Slieve Donard hotel, in Newcastle, Northern Ireland, solicited a similar response. The reception desk, which resembles an old-fashioned railway ticket window, rises from a chestnut-brown parquet floor in the high-ceilinged lobby, opposite a wood-burning fireplace framed with lush greenery. Busts of antlered deer share wall space with paintings of idyllic landscapes, all part of a faithful re-creation of the lobby as it existed at the turn of the 20th century. The hotel’s design team referenced an antique oil painting of the space when undertaking a recent $20 million renovation.

“There’s just so much to take in; your eye is drawn to so many different things. It’s almost sensory overload,” opines Michael Weston, the hotel’s former general manager. “When you walk through those doors, you can almost picture yourself being in a period drama. It is almost as if you’re transported back in time but with a modern twist.”

The Slieve Donard hotel and Royal County Down, frequently in tandem, have enraptured visitors for 135 years—in ways that go far beyond first impressions.

Across the 7,186-yard masterpiece designed by Old Tom Morris and, later, Harry Colt, the aforementioned dunes—blanketed by heather, Marram grasses, and gorse—inject an inherent drama from one shot to the next. On the fourth hole, I watch with bated breath from the elevated tee box as my high-arcing shot hangs in the air for several seconds before landing on the putting surface. The very next hole delivers an even more prolonged sense of anticipation, as I have to crest a steep dune to discover if my flared drive has avoided an untimely—and prickly—demise inside a patch of gorse bushes.

Even Royal County Down’s routing enhances the variance of play, as the course’s pair of distinctive nine-hole loops require golfers to continuously readjust to the wind’s direction. “That’s the great part of this golf course; it’s the beauty and the beast,” says Kevan Whitson, who retired as the club’s head professional and director of golf last year. “The place is some of the most beautiful scenery around, and yet it’s a very difficult golf course. When it’s hard and running in the summertime, the undulations gather the ball and move it into all sorts of places. Most of our greens are like slightly upturned saucers, so even just hitting some of the greens requires an extremely good shot.

“But that’s what the great courses tend to do,” he continues. “They make you play a bit defensively. If you hit really good golf shots, you’re rewarded. But if you hit really poor golf shots, you go into some horrific places, which are very difficult to recover from.”

Fortunately, recovery is offered in a variety of forms inside the Slieve Donard, located a mere five-minute walk from Royal County Down’s clubhouse. From therapeutic treatments inside the destination spa to nourishment at any of four restaurants and bars, the hotel specializes in rejuvenation. More than just an elegant place to retire, however, the historic property stands as a proud symbol for this part of the Emerald Isle. “It’s not a hotel,” Weston says. “It’s an institution that has touched probably every family in Northern Ireland in some way, shape, or form.”