The club was founded in 1888 as The County Club. Four years later it became The Royal County Club, under the patronage of the Duke of York. In 1895 it took its present name under the patronage of the Prince of Wales - the same Prince of Wales who became Edward VII. Royal status in British and Irish golf is granted, not earned by results, but the results came anyway. Royal Portrush has thirty-six holes - the championship Dunluce Links and the shorter Valley Links, used mostly by the members of the 'town' club Rathmore, and by the ladies and juniors of Royal Portrush. The Rathmore clubhouse and the ladies' clubhouse sit next to the Valley's first tee. A six-hole pitch and putt course called the Skerries starts from the same place. So does a driving range. The club is private. The setting is anything but - the whole stretch of coast from Portrush to the Causeway is part of how the place feels.

In 1947, the Rathmore member Fred Daly became the first Irishman to win the Open Championship. Four years later, in 1951, his home club hosted the championship itself - the first time the Open was held in Northern Ireland, and the first time it had ever been played outside Great Britain. Max Faulkner won. It would be the only major championship of his career. For sixty-eight years afterwards, that was the only Open ever played at Portrush, and for much of that gap the question of whether the Open would ever return there had no practical answer. The Troubles closed the door. Logistics closed it again. Then the club rebuilt the Dunluce to make it possible.

A number of changes were made for the 2019 Open. The old seventeenth and eighteenth holes of the Dunluce were removed, with that land going to the tented village. Two new holes - the current seventh and eighth - were built on ground taken from the Valley Links. Holes seven to sixteen of the old course were renumbered as nine to eighteen of the new. The second hole was lengthened by forty yards. The tenth, now the twelfth, was realigned. The course dropped from a par 72 to a par 71 but grew almost two hundred yards longer overall, to 7,337 yards. Bunkers went from 59 to 62. Since the Valley Links had lost two of its holes to the Dunluce, it had to be rebuilt too. The 2019 Open had the largest advance ticket sales of any Open ever held. Shane Lowry won by six in a gale. The 2025 Open returned to the redesigned course, and Scottie Scheffler won by four. The Open is now a returning regular at Portrush, not a once-a-generation event.

Golf rankings are a kind of opinion poll for a particular kind of expert, but the verdicts on the Dunluce Links agree more than they usually do. Golf World ranked it fourth among the hundred greatest courses in the British Isles in November 1996. Golf Magazine ranked it sixteenth in the world for 2023-24. Golf Digest ranked it as the fourth best course outside the United States in both 2007 and 2024. Darren Clarke, who lives in Portrush and who won the 2011 Open Championship, has called Royal Portrush his favourite course in the world. The reasons are partly about how the course plays - the blind shots, the falling fairways, the small fast greens - and partly about how the setting handles a championship. Few courses look as natural as the Dunluce does when the wind is up and there is rain blowing off the dunes.

The Dunluce hosted the Irish Open in 2012 - the first time a European Tour event had been played in Northern Ireland, and the first time the Irish Open had been held in Northern Ireland since 1953. The last time the Irish Open had been at Royal Portrush itself was 1947, the year Fred Daly won the Open at Hoylake. The 2012 event drew 112,000 spectators over four days and 131,000 over the whole week - the highest attendance ever recorded on the European Tour at that point, and the first time a European Tour event had sold out before play started. Jamie Donaldson won. The club has also hosted the Senior British Open Championship between 1995 and 1999 and again in 2004, as well as the 2010 Palmer Cup. Rathmore Golf Club's famous members include Fred Daly and Graeme McDowell, the 2010 U.S. Open champion who grew up here and learned the game on these dunes.