Davies savours the links

The clouds are gathering, the wind freshening, the rough thick and juicy. It must be another major championship in Scotland. This is the 26th staging of the Women's British Open, but the first time the tournament has moved north of the border. It might take a few more years before the women tee up at St Andrews but Turnberry provides another challenging test, as well as a spectacular setting, after recent forays to Birkdale and Lytham.

"If we want this tournament to be regarded as a major championship it has to move to these sort of courses, the great championship links that everyone has seen the men play," Britain's Laura Davies said. "We love playing these sorts of courses."

Davies, who last week won in Norway to maintain her run of winning every year since she turned professional in 1985, won the British Open in 1986 at Birkdale. The 38-year-old has failed to regain the title, however, and only two other home players have won the title since Alison Nicholas and, in 1991, Penny Grice-Whittaker, who shocked the crustier members of the golfing fraternity by appearing at a dinner during the Open at Muirfield as a cabaret singer.

The overseas challenge, in the form of Annika Sorenstam, Karrie Webb, Se Ri Pak and Juli Inkster, who recently won the US Women's Open at the age of 42, will be formidable again. Sorenstam is almost more dominant than Tiger Woods is in the men's game. She has won seven times this year, at a rate virtually of one every other tournament, and has only finished outside the top-three twice.

Unlike Davies, Webb and Pak, Sorenstam has yet to win Europe's only women's major. Pak was blown away, Tiger-like, at Lytham four years ago but returned to the tranquility of Sunningdale to win last year. "This is very different," she said. She has probably been talking to Mhairi McKay, a member of Turnberry, as she grew up in Girvan.

"Everyone has been asking my advice on where to stay, where to eat, what's the weather going to be like. I told them it would be cold, wet and windy," McKay said. McKay, who was at Stanford University at the same time as Woods, was a ball-spotter on the first hole of the 1986 Open here.

"It was raining and the wind was blowing off the sea so everyone went in the rough on the other side of the fairway," she recalled. "I was 11 years old, I was bored and crying. It was the most miserable I've ever been on a golf course but I fell in love with the game here."

The week previously, just before the course was closed, McKay and her mother and siblings were playing when a single golfer came up behind. "My mum said it was Nick Faldo and I went to get his autograph. He said: 'Isn't this course too hard for you?' I said, 'Not really'. I don't know if I should have said that."