Swinging close to Heaven on Cruit Island

It struck me standing on the sixth tee at Cruit Island last week that (a) there cannot possibly be a more breath-taking, stunningly beautiful place on the face of this earth and (b) that playing your first serious round of golf on a course where the next stop is Newfoundland is akin to choosing Everest for your hill walking debut.

Most courses I see on telly have pretty streams and ponds as water hazards; on many of the holes at Cruit Island, near Kincasslagh, Co Donegal, your ball finds a watery grave in the Atlantic Ocean if (a) you put sufficient slice on it (a la Agassi), (b) release your grip on the club just as you make contact with it and (c) your post-swing position leaves you sitting on the grass with your right leg slung over your left shoulder.

Plonk. "I am Jean Van de Velde." Time to try again. And again. And again.

After losing three white balls on the first four holes, my playing partner suggested I use a luminous orange one, a suggestion that hurt a little because I felt he was hinting that I had a problem with my swing. He seemed worried, too, about the throngs of people waiting at each tee behind us, looking on impatiently as I waded through the undergrowth in search of my unlosable luminous orange balls. It was a nice day, what was their hurry? Time isn't money on Cruit Island, time is what you use to find your unlosable luminous orange balls.

Those balls, though, weren't much use at the sixth because even if you could see where they landed, you'd need an inflatable dinghy to retrieve them, and I didn't have one in my golf bag.

It wasn't all that long ago that Donegal fishermen chucked conger eels, crayfish and dogfish back in to the sea when they turned up in their nets because they reckoned nobody in their right mind would eat the ugly looking blighters. But then those mad people on the Continent decided they were tasty and now they're a very expensive delicacy and exported in truck loads. These days they'll sell anything that appears in their nets - the weirder the dearer - so I'm wondering if the luminous orange golf balls I hit from the sixth tee were in that French-bound truck I saw leaving Burtonport last week and are now being served with a plum sauce in a plush Parisian restaurant at £100 a go.

Day Two was better at the sixth - I adjusted my grip (using both hands this time), aimed for where I didn't want to go (the sea) and used the ladies' tee. Okay, okay I concede: men can hit golf balls further than every woman except Laura Davies, but I was damned if I'd admit it without having a bloody good go first.

I also discovered the four-iron on Day Two, and I think it's love. I tried all the others on Day One with no joy (eg I hit the ball further with my putter than I did with an eight-iron) but when I rooted through my bag on Day Two, that little four-iron smiled out at me, I thought of Lawrence Donegan's wonderful book, A Four-Iron In the Soul, I smiled back and we've been together ever since. Don't get me wrong, my four-iron didn't help lower my scores, it was just that my shots suddenly became airborne and not even scoring my school's only points in a 124-3 basketball defeat by Kilcullen many years ago gave me a sporting feeling like it. Day Three was windy, very windy, and wind at Cruit Island is no laughing matter. Play into it and every shot is a Garryowen. A helmet would have been handy, just to protect my skull from my own ball. If I got as much distance as I got height, I would have been over-shooting the green. But I didn't, so I wasn't.

The real highlight, though, of Day Three was the presence in the fourball ahead of us of . . . Daniel O'Donnell, Cruit Island's most famous member. There were coach loads of big Scottish women parked outside his mother's house in Kincasslagh praying for a glimpse of the legend and here was me and my four-iron within putting distance of him.

We (me and my four-iron) were finding it hard to concentrate on our game, to be honest, too busy sneaking a look at how Daniel was coping with the wind. Not a bother on him. Whooooosh, up the centre of fairways the width of telegraph poles, ones that make Carnoustie look as menacing as a pitch and putt course. "Aim for Daniel," my playing partner advised me from there on in. It was useful advice, too, because he was the only recognisable marker on a course so hilly that you need crampons to get from the tee to the green.

Not that Daniel was ever in any danger of being hit (my four-iron Garryowened every shot that day, even our putts) so I was in no danger of being ripped limb from limb by the coach loads of big Scottish women we passed on the way back home.

I finished with a birdie on the par 14 ninth (or was it a par four?) and returned to the "Lobster Pot" in Burtonport to buy my four-iron 12 oysters and a pint of Guinness - he'd earned them. And then we decided (a) we'd stick with pitch and putt and (b) we'd advise every one we ever met to see Cruit Island before they die because heaven, if that's where you're going, couldn't hold a candle to it.