Ten miles offshore from Turnberry, in the magnificently broad Firth of Something or Other on the southwest coast of Scotland, stands the stately Ailsa Craig. A large 500 million-year-old volcanic plug rising out of the sea to 338 metres, this granite edifice has been causing consternation to visitors to this gentle portion of Ayrshire coast for, well, about 500 million years.

“What the hell is that?” they have perennially exclaimed, in a variety of primitive languages. But when they have turned round to look again — it has disappeared! What they always say around here about the Ailsa Craig is that if you can see it, it’s about to rain; and if you can’t see it, it’s raining. And while this is partly just a jokey warning to carry a hat and umbrella at all times, it’s also surely about how the local landscape has quite a rich history of flattering to deceive.

Golf is all about topography, of course, but Turnberry is surely tops for topographical quirks. For one thing, it used to be dead easy to get here (by train) and now it turns out to be almost impossible. Near by is the famous “electric brae”, where the road goes up but appears to go down; next to that is the Bridge of Doon, which is — hilariously — closed for part of every day at present. (This is the place that Brigadoon, the musical, is based on, so by rights it ought to exist for only one day in every hundred years in any case.) In Robert Burns’s famous poem, Tam o’ Shanter’s nightmare ride took him to Alloway church (and he fervently wished it hadn’t). And on all the roads round about, there are friendly signs that say “Haste Ye Back” — which is a bit disorientating if, as far as you’re concerned, you’ve only just got here.

Evidently the main reason the Open has visited Turnberry only three times before is this problem of tricky access. Personally, I’ve been waiting for years to come here to watch some Open golf, quietly wondering what the problem was.

The thing is, when I got interested in golf in 1995, two memorable things happened almost immediately. First, someone lent me a tape of the 1994 Open at Turnberry, with its stupendous last-day battle between Nick Price and Jesper Parnevik. And second, once The Times heard I was having some lessons, a bright spark sent me here on a gruelling travel assignment: to spend two free nights at the lovely Turnberry Hotel, eat lashings of free first-class food and undergo several sessions of invaluable free video tuition from the professional.

Sadly, the video tuition was enough to put me off lessons for ever. Once you have seen your nasty, brutish and ever so short golf swing captured unflatteringly from behind, all your dreams of being the new Ernie Els are bound to collapse. But even so, I did fall in love with Turnberry and have found it a romantic golfing location ever since. The lighthouse! The food! The electric brae! The food! Reading a biography of Ellen Terry, the great actress, I was disproportionately excited to learn that Terry’s illegitimate offspring, Edith Craig and Edward Gordon Craig, acquired the “Craig” bit of their names from the landmark seen from Turnberry.

Evidently it occurred to Ellen Terry that “Ailsa Craig” would make a really good stage name for her actress daughter — although only if you left aside its associations with a big old lump of barren rock covered in bird droppings, obviously.

Will Turnberry be magical this week? (You wondered where all this was heading and here it is.) Well, yesterday there was certainly a fittingly Brigadoonish feeling of where-did-everybody-go. I’ve never seen an Open course with so few people on it.

But we were all extremely happy, we few. We trilled with the birds. We flitted with the butterflies. We floated like the wispy long grass of the treacherous rough. When I took my stroll to the famous lighthouse, I wasn’t the least surprised to see Gary Lineker there doing a piece to camera. I wasn’t surprised, either, when I looked round again — and he’d gone! So many cases of disappearance. Now you see it, now you don’t.

Already a couple of things have unaccountably gone missing this week: Sandy Lyle’s future as a diplomat, for example. Also Colin Montgomerie’s sang-froid. (I’m joking, of course. Montgomerie never had any sang-froid.) And I’ve just remembered something quite significant that happened when I was here at Turnberry all those years ago.

There’s a famous par-three course in front of the hotel and I decided to assault it on my own. “How many balls do you want?” the chap in the clubhouse asked and I remember how I scoffed, inwardly, “This chap clearly doesn’t know much about golf” and then said that one ball would be quite sufficient, thank you.

Within five minutes I’d knocked a shot into a bush — and it disappeared! It bounced once, hopped gaily into the foliage and was gone. Under the bush I found an old broomhead and a hubcap, but no ball. I shook the bush and walked round the bush, poking my arm into it, for about 20 minutes before I accepted it was pointless. You don’t suppose something similar will happen to any other golf balls this week? Ooh. Too spooky.