The PGA Centenary course at Gleneagles, where the 2014 Ryder Cup will be played

When the wind howls as satanically as it does on the coast of Fife and you’re on a golf course where 16 players can be simultaneously on the same fairway, it’s crucial that you perfect your shout of “Fore!”.

I thought, after two decades of spraying golf shots across England, I’d got mine right but, as I learnt from my playing partner Neil, my bark doesn’t cut it at St Andrews, or the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, to give it its full title. When Neil shouts “Fore!”, he summons every fleck of Scottish grit from his belly. It’s the kind of sound one imagines William Wallace might have made charging into battle. Stand too close, as I did when we teed off at the 15th hole, and the effect is not dissimilar to being hit in the ear by a Tiger Woods drive.

As a former St Andrews caddie, Neil patrols the fairways of the home of golf with an authority that you just don’t get from mere golfers. He’s one of my playing partners today but he’s also my foghorn, traffic warden, cartographer and raconteur. He offers me all the services of a bagman, without actually carrying my bag (which, as any good caddie will tell you, is the least important part of the job anyway). The Old Course here is the most famous golfing Valhalla in the world, its tee times booked up a year in advance. The R&A building behind its first tee – not, as so many people think, St Andrews’ clubhouse but the headquarters of golf’s governing body – is as instantly familiar to me as any institution from my past. However, negotiating this deceptively undulating and raw patch of common land in the flesh is something different entirely. “Play this as a newcomer without a caddie and you might as well be blind,” says Neil. In my case, that probably applies twofold.

None of my golfing acquaintances could believe it when I told them this was going to be my first time playing at St Andrews. When I admitted I’d actually never played in Scotland at all, they looked at me in the way you might look at someone who lectures you on the pronunciation of the word “Parmigiano”, then admits they’ve never been to Italy. For four years, as an adolescent, I played golf almost every day. At one notably girlfriendless point, I owned 321 meticulously labelled, self-taped golf videos. In 2006, while researching my latest golf book, Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia, I even foolishly tried my hand at playing the game at a professional level.

Yet golf north of the border had never appealed to me. It looked too bleak, too treeless, too windy. I was conscious that this reasoning would not win me any friends in the UK’s more learned clubhouses but I had never, once, enjoyed hitting a golf ball while suffering from hypothermia.

Deciding it was best to ease myself into the dragon’s lair, I began with two nights at Gleneagles, 50 miles to the west of St Andrews in the Ochil Hills. I had fond memories of watching the Scottish Open played on its delectable, moorlike King’s Course. I reasoned that, should a demonic gale blow my shots into the gorse, I could always console myself by crying into one of the 13 different types of pillow that the accompanying hotel has available on room service.

I was pleasantly surprised to find the place bathed in sunshine upon my arrival but by the next morning a Scottish pea-souper had descended. It seemed somehow unnecessary, since being in this part of the world can in itself feel a bit like being gently simmered in a golfing broth. My hotel room had its TV pretuned to a golf channel showing fifth division former pros being interviewed from a car park. Outside, I counted eight practice putting greens and felt sure a couple more were lurking in the mist: specially placed, perhaps, for those suffering from puttophilia, the little-known disease that prevents the sufferer from walking more than eight feet without experiencing a craven need to gently roll a ball across some closely-mown grass.

In 2014, Gleneagles will for the first time host the Ryder Cup, the biennial golf match between Europe and the United States, at which point you will see 942 Bentleys in its car park instead of the usual 127. This event will be played on its PGA Centenary course, the newest and longest of its three championship 18-holers. Those hoping to traverse this layout without a buggy should be warned that many of the walks between greens and tees are equal to the combined length of Nick Faldo’s four gardens. As its deep rough swallowed up £20-worth of my ball supply, I peered longingly at fairways belonging to the more sweet-natured King’s and Queen’s courses. An assistant pro, an urbane man at the hotel reception desk and an astonishingly attentive caddie, Mickey, all told me they liked the Centenary course least, and it was interesting to see that when Colin Montgomerie, Europe’s next Ryder Cup captain, teed off for a practice round just before me, he did so on the King’s. As one of the course marshals said: “Jack Nicklaus built the Centenary course but God built the other two.”

If so, who built St Andrews? The terrain’s natural aptness for golf is such that, when I see a round, bright white, dimpled mushroom growing out of the third fairway, it does not seem remotely freakish. Golf, or something closely approximating it, has been played here since the 1400s. Since the Society of St Andrews Golfers was founded in 1754, amazingly little about the course has been altered. One big addition is the Old Course Hotel, built in 1968, which provides my stylishly retro accommodation for the night and makes the tee shot at the 17th a heart-in-the-mouth challenge. The missing roof tiles and dented window frames tell the story of innumerable sliced drives.

That aside, the Old Course is pretty much the same place that men in jackets and ties played a hundred and more years ago: nine holes out towards the sea, nine holes back. The shared fairways (the 1st is also the 18th, the 2nd the 17th, and so on) seem like a recipe for sore heads but somehow it all works.

The town itself is undoubtedly touristy, but beyond the endless golfing memorabilia, it’s very folksy. Neil and my other playing partner, Gordon, St Andrews’ links superintendent, make fun of me for buying balls with the club logo on them, and relate the fibs the caddies tell gullible American visitors, including one about the flag mast on the 18th (which is actually from the Cutty Sark) being part of a ship that once washed up there in a storm.

Spend a few hours here, and it soon becomes clear that it is neither the R&A nor the visitors, nor the members of the various St Andrews clubs – there are seven different courses – that are the place’s lifeblood; it is the caddies. Each earns £40 per round, £5 of which goes to St Andrews itself, and they must often get up at 3.30am in order to be sure of a day’s work. The tips, though, are good. The actor Bill Murray gave Neil £250 when he hauled his bag. “He did insist that I let him call me ‘Muscles’, though.”

Neil might not be the archetypal snaggle-toothed, chain-smoking, septuagenarian Scottish caddie – he’s 37, happily married, with spiky yellow hair – but he and Gordon and the other locals I meet offer all the stories the romantic in you might hope for from St Andrews regulars. There’s the one about the caddiemaster caught on CCTV stealing an R&A dustbin, the one about the four-caddie fist fight on the green, the one about the naked golf tournament. These are people who have memorised the names of all 112 bunkers and their accompanying legends too. My favourite is Admiral’s, a malignant half-hidden doom pit on the 12th – so named because of the naval officer who fell into it while gawping at a bonnie lass walking along the shore.

From the moment you arrive, the place feels like a movie set  (the opening scene of Chariots of Fire was filmed here) yet the lack of human interference with the landscape makes it feel rough and hyper-real. I’m not sentimental about golf courses but, upon leaving, it’s hard not to want to make a grand closing gesture. When I tell a caddie that I’m thinking of kissing the spot next to the 17th fairway where I hit one of the best shots of my life, he advises against it. “I had a pee there the other day,” he admits. It’s true what they say: it’s not just a bunch of history and a lack of trees that make St Andrews a bit different from all other golf courses.

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Picturesque places to pitch up and putt

Here are three less well-known British golf courses that are well worth visiting:

Hollinwell
Some golfing terrain simply makes a grand entrance mandatory and entrances don’t come much grander than the one at Hollinwell. The long, sweeping, tree-lined downhill drive to the white, semi-gothic clubhouse of this north-east Midlands course will be the nearest thing many British golfers experience to the journey up Magnolia Lane to the first tee of the Augusta National club, home to the US Masters. Lying in a bowl of seemingly endless forestry commission land, Hollinwell gives no hint that the sprawling council estates of Mansfield are just a few miles up the road.

The sense of golf-as-self-enclosed- alternative-kingdom is rarely as strong as it is here among the heather, gorse and pine. On a damp autumn day, when the course has long since put in its annual time as an Open qualifying venue and the fairways have accordingly been expanded to something more generous than the width of a hard-baked grass bowling lane, there may be no purer test of golf in the UK. And I say all this as someone who once had his application for membership turned down there. I can only face the facts: if I were a golf course as good as this, I’m not sure I’d want me as a member either.

Stoke Park
More gentle and forgiving than other peers outside London such as Wentworth and Sunningdale, the course formerly known as Stoke Poges still packs a subtle punch, not least on its lake-guarded seventh hole, the model for the much more infamous 12th at Augusta.

Stoke, which has been called “Britain’s greatest country club”, provided the setting for James Bond’s famous round with the cheating Goldfinger and a romantic weekend for Bridget Jones and Daniel Cleaver. On an average Saturday, it will probably feature more film stars and former footballers per square yard than any other golf course in Britain. In spite of this and the fact that all visiting players must be guests of members or guests at the hotel, it’s surprisingly welcoming to the less socially established golfer, which is not something you can say about many courses that boast such a palatial clubhouse.

Thorpeness
Golf courses often usually tend to view themselves as superior to or entirely separate from their surrounding locale. Those that do attempt to complement the landscape rarely get it right but Thorpeness, on the Suffolk coast, could not fit more seamlessly with the charming arts and crafts village that spawned it.

Very little has changed about it since 1922, when the village’s founder, Glencairn Stuart Ogilvie, commissioned architect James Braid to build it. The course combines an Old England, ice-cream-and-sun-hat flavour with some very modern thinking, as egalitarian part-time membership schemes abound and visitors are treated with just as much respect as Wodehousian oldest members. The course itself does not always receive the plaudits of Aldeburgh, its gorsey near-neighbour, but in many ways it’s even more impressive and diverse. It even has its own smell: a herby, brackish odour that will linger pleasantly in your nostrils and will only begin to dissipate as you tuck into your well-deserved post-round fish and chips on the nearby seafront.

Tom Cox’s ‘Bring Me the Head of Sergio Garcia: My Year of Swinging Dangerously on the Pro Golf Tour’ (£8.99) is published by Yellow Jersey

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Details

For further information or to make a reservation, contact Resort Sales on 0800 704 705 or visit www.gleneagles.com. Rates for a classic room at Gleneagles, including full Scottish breakfast and use of the club’s leisure facilities, start at £225.11 (offer excludes Easter and is available until April 30)