The golf course had two personalities, and no smooth segue between them was in evidence. It threw visitors off balance, left them hot and gorse-scratched and irritated. Many who had begun the day in a positive frame of mind declined to visit the clubhouse for a drink afterwards, instead hurling their clubs into their car boot, not even bothering to change out of their spiked shoes, blowing out of the car park in a plume of exhaust smoke and a loud scrape of metal against speed bump, like people who’d stolen their own cars. For the first nine holes, everything was very polite and neatly mown, a sculpted suppression of nature that, were you blindfolded and dropped into it, would have been hard to distinguish from the one that characterises a thousand other golf courses. But after the ninth green players followed a steep tunnelled path through a small city of gorse and skyscraper ferns and emerged into a primal, unwashed otherplace that they had to trust, going by what the map on the back of the scorecard told them, was the tenth tee. Quarter-sheared, mad-eyed sheep and horned cattle roamed the fairways and tees indiscriminately. Jangly-nerved salesmen and insurance brokers backed off their putts as large dark winged shapes wheeled overhead, mocking them with shrieking beaked laughter. Balls struck sweetly from tees ricocheted off assorted hidden rocks into tussocky bogs, never to be seen again. These balls soared unpredictably owing to the dung caking their surface and sudden corridors of diabolical wind coming down off the moor. It was not uncommon to see visitors holding up play by attempting to herd sheep, cattle and ponies out of their playing line. Regulars were more nonchalant and casually floated their drives over the animals’ heads, but even they were not exempt from pastoral strife. Believed to be assured of victory in the 1989 club championship as he strutted the mounds of the final fairway, Tom Bracewell threw away his advantage when a heifer sat on his ball and refused to move. A crowd soon gathered around the cow, the competitors who had been awaiting the result of the event in the clubhouse bar gradually filtering out to watch, until over a hundred of us stood staring at the animal. Christine Chagford, who before taking her job behind the bar at the club had spent a lot of time in close proximity to cattle, finally managed to sweet talk the cow into giving way and letting the group behind play through, but not before she’d planted a kiss on its forehead and posed for a photo which would later be framed and hung on the wall of the Men’s Bar. Rattled, Bracewell racked up a triple bogey seven, putting him in a sudden death playoff with Christine’s cousin Tony, which Bracewell subsequently lost. A year later, the general consensus was that he had still not recovered: a pallid, stooped figure, seen, if seen at all, staring forlornly at competition result boards and handicap tables in the back room of the clubhouse or down on the practice ground at sundown, scratching his chin and assessing the balls spread diversely in front of him, some or other mail order teaching contraption abandoned on the ground behind him.