I’VE had hairy moments on the golf course before — but none as harey as this.

I’m on the third hole of the K Club golf course, venue for this year’s Ryder Cup showdown between America’s and Europe’s finest golfers next week — the biggest golf event in the British Isles this year. And I’ve just played an atrocious iron shot.

The ball has scuttled off 50m to the right, heading for a bunker. It scoots through the sand and hits what appears to be a rake before popping out and nestling in some grass. Actually not all that bad. But definitely not good.

I go to find my ball. Then I realise something. As I walk over, I see that the “rake” is not a rake. It is, in fact, a hare. The hare is sitting dead still (luckily not “dead”) in the bunker. It looks, to borrow a phrase from P. G. Wodehouse (who loved a game of golf), “if not actually disgruntled . . . far from being gruntled” — and just a little bit dazed.

When I’m a yard or so away, it finally — casting a withering look — hops away. I’ve hit a hare! Do you get any points for that like you do for birdies, eagles and albatrosses in golf, I ask John, my playing partner, who confirms that I definitely had hit the hare.

“No you don’t!” he says, shaking his head in disbelief. “In all my years of golf, I can safely say I’ve never seen that before!” In the run-up to the last Ryder Cup in the British Isles, I played the Brabazon course at The Belfry, the West Midlands venue, in 2002. I didn’t play very well then either (though I didn’t hit any hares). The Belfry’s hotel, part of the De Vere chain, proved to be a bit of a let down: tiny rooms, run-of-the-mill restaurant, noisy, laddish bar and a Ritzy-style nightclub. Yes, it was fun — but it certainly wasn’t classy.

The K Club in Co Kildare, however, is a whole different ball game. The club, which opened in 1991 with 69 rooms, is upmarket in the “look at me, aren’t we doing well” sense of the word — and doesn’t care who knows it.

The seemingly endless number of BMWs, Mercs and Porsches, plus the helicopter pad close to the ninth hole (we have to pause while a helicopter lifts off), are the first signs of conspicuous consumption. Then comes the main building, a grand yellow country house on a hill overlooking 220ha (550 acres) of gardens, parkland and the River Liffey.

The front door is guarded by two large, black, stone cats. Inside are oriental carpets, plush pink sofas, portraits of elegant women wearing hats and pearls, and bronze sculptures of racehorses. I overhear an attendant asking some newcomers — who have just dropped in by helicopter — if they would like a drink: “Champagne, sirs?” They wave a hand in the affirmative.

There is a definite, and quite splendid, “lord of the manor” feel about the K Club. My room knocks for six the place I slept in at the Belfry: giant bed, thick aquamarine carpet, big mirrored wardrobe, fancy bathrobe with the hotel crest, which says “Fortuna Favente” — by favour and fortune (not for the hare on the third hole) — on the pocket.

The evening before our round we dine at the Byerley Turk restaurant. I have the seared king scallops with onion ice-cream (yes, really, and very nice it is, too), followed by the delightful fillet of Irish beef with seared foie gras and périgueux sauce, and the “little igloo of meringue filled with vanilla ice-cream and griottine cherries” (highly recommended) — all washed down with a bottle of red and a glass of Jameson whiskey (after all, we are in Ireland).

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