You could tell that the lay of the land was right for a golf course. It would have been a pretty flat, open, treeless course, in the classic Scottish seaside links style – with rough the only real hazard off the fairways. You could imagine there were maybe half a dozen holes up by the cliff edge, maybe only three actually bordering on it, with greens almost projecting out into fresh air. The rest of the course would have headed inland, with the terrain falling away gently towards the turn. But I couldn’t with any confidence locate a single green. There were lots of mounds and hollows that might be the vestiges of bunkers – but the evidence was profoundly unsatisfying. The mounds were low, the hollows shallow. And even when the pattern of these mounds and hollows was set in a telltale configuration, nowhere could I detect roughly circular areas of perfectly flat ground, circular areas which might yield evidence of the better quality grasses that constitute a green.

   It was hugely frustrating.

   And yet, on the other hand, this complete lack of any trace whatsoever, this complete absence of evidence, made the ghostliness of the whole business more intense. I spent hours stomping back and forth with my head bent, scanning the ground as it scrolled beneath my feet. Sometimes I even got down on my hands and knees and crawled across long forgotten fairways. Across? Maybe I was crawling along them. Up them. Or down them.