Wow, wow and thrice wow. St Enodoc is a fantastic golf links. If ever a sporting arena deserves to be romanticised in poetry it does. And, indeed, is. John Betjeman, who is buried in the church in its grounds, extolled its many virtues in verse.
I would not pretend to have his mastery of language so would run out of superlatives to describe the experience.
My game has been in the doldrums lately and I feared a repeat of recent woes when I lost a ball on the par-five first and missed a comfortable putt for a couple of points on the second.
But it was in true St Enodoc style that love began to flicker on the third. My tee-shot bounded over tarmac path and required a putter out of a hedge with my second, to get me back on the course. Sounds unpromising, doesn't it? But I clipped a nine iron up and over the wall which runs across the hole and knocked in the subsequent putt for quite the most surreal par of my life.
That was the beginning of a trail of excitement which included the mind-blowing 6th with its huge dune, known as the Himalayas and the nerve-wracking 7th with a shot into the unknown but on which both Mrs W and I recorded pars.
The 10th is an astonishing golf hole, demanding a tee-shot over water, brush and queues of walkers heading down to the beach as well as the green at the side of the aforementioned church.
I could go on and on. I loved the very difficult par 3 17th because I took a driver and landed the ball within 10 feet of the hole.
It may be that a course becomes more beautiful if a golfer is playing it well - I needed my 12-handicapper's A-game to score 30 points but I think I would have loved it anyway.
Yes, you will never get a flat lie on a fairway, thanks to its notorious humps and yes, if your drives are errant, you may not find your ball... but golf isn't an easy game and certainly not on one of the world's top courses which St Enodoc apparently is.
I walked off beaming, so it's in my top one so far.
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