A town filled with large oaks and picturesque homes briefly breaks up the monotony before giving way to gravel-sprinkled roads crisscrossing through the fields. Along one of these tracts is a wooden sign discernible from the fence posts only by the block letters carved across the front: "BALLYNEAL."

The hand-carved sign, the roads filled with ruts from rain, the nondescript, loamy plains -- none of it seems to fit, almost if someone is playing a cruel trick.

But make your way past the sign up the winding driveway, around what appears to be the only hill for hundreds of miles, and it all makes sense.

Carved through an area the locals call the chop hills, Ballyneal Golf and Hunt Club, with its rugged beauty and blend-with-the-land design, seems to have been lifted from the links land of Ireland or Scotland and placed in the northeastern corner of Colorado, just a few miles from the Nebraska state line.

One of the world's most spectacular golf courses, Ballyneal is truly in the boonies -- and definitely worth the trip.

"It's the worst pasture land, it can't be farmed and in the community it was considered the worst piece of property in the area," says Rupert O'Neal, who created Ballyneal with his brother, Jim. "It just happens to be perfect for golf."

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Ballyneal isn't alone in the gem-in-the-middle-of-nowhere category of golf courses.

Drive along the coast of Oregon and you might happen upon Bandon, a charming little community about 90 miles north of the California state line. Though there only 2,900 people, it's home to three of the most breathtaking golf courses you'll ever find at the Bandon Dunes Golf Resort.

Go to Cashiers, N.C., and there's Wade Hampton Golf Club, a Tom Fazio-created pearl carved among the centuries-old trees, framed by rock-walled mountains in the 531,000-acre Nantahala National Forest. Of course, if you want to hit Wal-Mart for a dozen Titleists, you'll have to drive 30 miles just to get to Franklin, population 3,600.

Same thing with Pinon Hills Golf Course in Farmington, N.M. It's 183 miles from Albuquerque, even further from Denver, yet is arguably the best golf deal in North America: $36.50 nonresident weekday green fee to play a course -- carved around sandstone cliffs and massive arroyos -- regularly ranked among the best in the country.

Then there's Sand Hills Golf Club in Mullen, Neb.

The seat of a Hooker County, Mullen is about an eight-hour drive from Denver or Omaha and has a population of 500 -- more village than town -- giving it exponentially more cattle than people.

Deep in this wind-swept expanse is Sand Hills, another plucked-from-the-Scottish-coast links-style course that designers Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw didn't so much build as find among the dunes of western Nebraska. Created by developer Dick Youngscap, Sand Hills opened in 1995 without much fanfare. But like many gems, this one didn't stay covered for long.

"When the idea of Sand Hills was even conceived, Dick didn't intend it to be a great golf resort, a destination club," says Sand Hills golf director Cameron Warner, who grew up in the area. "He had no intention of trying to create a world-renowned course, but that just took care of itself, as amazing as it was."

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O'Neal used a similar blueprint -- and ended up with the same spectacular result.

Ballyneal started as a pheasant hunting club in the farmland south of Holyoke, but O'Neal, who grew up on the family farm, wanted more, to create something that would serve as a lasting legacy to his hometown. He decided to build a golf course and picked one of the most worthless -- at least to the agriculturally community -- pieces of land in the area: the chop hills.

"It's pretty atypical for the area," O'Neal says. "The chop hills run about four miles long, a half-mile wide and the people around here don't have much use for it."

Next up was finding an architect. They turned to Tom Doak, who worked under Pete Dye and specializes in designing links-style courses, including Pacific Dunes in Bandon.

Doak took a similar minimalist design approach as Coore and Crenshaw at Sand Hills, barely moving any dirt as he weaved holes between the dunes, scraped the top of the grass to reveal natural bunkers, covering it with fescue grasses so the ball could bounce and run down the fairways.

What they ended up with is a course that could be part of the British Open rotation -- even the town, Holyoke, sounds like something from across the pond -- if it wasn't landlocked near the edge of the Nebraska panhandle. And since it opened last fall, Ballyneal has quickly become recognized as one of the best golf courses in the country.

"If you build a golf course in the middle of nowhere like this, you have to get some of that recognition or you're not likely to succeed financially," O'Neal says. "We're not particularly wealthy and we need this golf course to find a footing to make its weight. We had a lot of faith in the property going in and we had a lot of faith in Mr. Doak. We got one in the wheelhouse and Tom smashed it."

Right out of the middle of nowhere.

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See the interactive: http://asap.ap.org/data/interactives/_sports/golfmap/

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John Marshall is asap's sports reporter, now based in Kansas City.

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