"So when I got involved with Kingarrock, it was because it represented a chance to present golf in a way you rarely see these days."

John Huggan profiles Kingarrock, what sounds like a must play on a visit to Scotland.

Happily, such options do exist. And one of the very best is the nine-hole, 2,022-yard Kingarrock course near the village of Ceres in Fife. At Kingarrock, which sits in the grounds of the National Trust-owned Hill of Tarvit country house, you don't play with modern clubs and balls. Instead, your bag contains just five clubs – one wood, three irons and a putter – all of them hickory-shafted. And on your tee – which is no more than one inch-long – sits one or other of the two "Kingarrock" balls. One aims to replicate distance from 1898, the other, slightly longer, 1924.

"One of the great things golf does have is history," says two-time Amateur champion Peter McEvoy, who laid out the course. "You can, for example, play on all the great courses where all the great champions have walked. But you can't play exactly the same game. So when I got involved with Kingarrock, it was because it represented a chance to present golf in a way you rarely see these days."

Par at Kingarrock is 37. There are four par-5s, ranging from the 289-yard uphill first to the 368-yard dogleg fifth. The longest of the three par-3s is the 166-yard second. And both par-4s measure just over 200 yards. Given a reasonable level of play, a typical round takes no more than 50 minutes and costs £20.

Those are the details, but the best part is that everything about Kingarrock is enormous fun, a much neglected aspect of golf in these increasingly misguided days when club committees mistake the penal qualities of narrow fairways, thick rough and ever-distant back tees for progress.