They say you have to drive through an awful lot of Lincolnshire before you get to Lincolnshire. If you’re coming from Norfolk, the flatlands and half-derelict petrol stations stretch on and on, until you begin to wonder if the cartographers who mapped out this bit of land were so beset by ennui that they gave up halfway. It’s a landscape that enchants and spooks in equal measure, and it is not golfing country.

To arrive at Woodhall Spa at the end of this is like traversing a vast desert and being confronted by a city of dreams: a place simultaneously ancient and modern, weather-worn and clean. Boasting two courses and some of the finest practice facilities in the UK, Woodhall is the headquarters of the English Golf Union, and pretty much forms the screensaver in my head when I think of golf. The population itself is like a small segment of leafiest Surrey that got annoyed with its nouveau riche neighbours and staged a getaway. Accordingly, the best and most famous of its two courses, the Hotchkin, is like a more straight-talking answer to Wentworth or Sunningdale.

I say this, but what do I really know about the Hotchkin? My friend Robin, who has joined me today, and I have each only been here once before, in 1990, to play in the club’s Junior Open. In that hard-baked summer, the place was an education: a course where a wayward shot would be punished, as opposed to just landing on another fairway, but also where a well-struck wedge off a clean, bare lie would hit a green and spin, instead of just bouncing through it. Both of us have repeatedly cited it as one of our favourite places to play golf ever since.

But a terrible shiver goes through me before my first tee shot. What if I’ve inflated it in my mind? I am reassured, therefore, to find my first, gently stroked 20ft putt shoot almost as far past the hole again, then to stand on the second tee contemplating a shot that feels like 4 per cent fairway, 30 per cent bunker and 66 per cent rough. This is the Hotchkin I remember: slick, smooth, yet also giving the golfer the portentous sense that the surrounding heathland could sprout limbs and teeth and attack at any moment. Essentially, we’re talking the forest from Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, but dotted with a few preternaturally smooth patches of grass that golfers from less cultured courses might just about recognise as “putting surfaces”.

The first thing a person will usually say to you when you mention the Hotchkin is that it has a bunker for every day of the year. Like “the key to good play is keeping your head down”, and, “Sam Torrance is a half-decent commentator”, this is in fact one of those golfing myths that, through sheer repetition, gets erroneously reported as fact. There are now only 111 bunkers on the course, and there have never been more than 200, although the grass and heather islands in some of them make the tally slightly nebulous.

Robin and I might view this as a disappointment, but can’t quite muster the necessary fervour. Tied at seven over par, we are standing on the tee of the par three 12th, where in 1982, two members playing against one another in a club match both made hole-in-ones. The last thing we are lamenting is a scarcity of bunkers. We’ve already been in five of them apiece, and at least two of those I feared I’d never get out of. Particularly chasmic are those to the left of the fourth green and to the right of the fifth – the former of which has been known not only to trap very slightly offline approach shots, but also a Hillman Imp owned by a competitor in the 1974 English Amateur Championship who decided to drive across the course as a short cut back from a practice session.

“This course, which looks so beautifully natural, is, in a sense, completely artificial. All those fine big bunkers which look as if they had ‘just growed’ were dug by the hand of man,” wrote the legendary golf scribe Bernard Darwin about the Hotchkin in 1927. Personally, I think he was misinformed. It will take a lot more than a quote from a famous dead man to believe that the sandtraps gaping so hungrily in and around the fairways have not been there since the dawn of time.

Whatever the case, Woodhall Spa is a place that inspires more “How do you define ‘natural’?” debates than most. How could you not have built a golf course here? I can see how, spending much of your time on this terrain, you might feel infused with the majesty and importance of it, and can slightly see why, during our second round in the afternoon, three English Golf Union officials in a buggy felt the need to question haughtily our presence on the fourth green. Six hours hacking your ball out of Woodhall’s heather can leave you looking a bit like you’ve slept in it. I would have been suspicious of us, too.

It was what one of them muttered before they drove off, after I’d told him I was writing about the course, which confused me: “Well, make sure you give it a good review, in that case…” Did he really think someone would need an extra prod? How would he not realise, after spending so much of his time here, that Woodhall is so much bigger than that?

Tom Cox is the author of ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia’

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The details

Woodhall Spa, “The Home of English Golf”, The Broadway, Woodhall Spa, Lincolnshire. 01526 352511; www.woodhallspagolf.com