Philip Reid on a links-like venue inspired by Irish courses such as Royal Portrush and Ballybunion

The story, a true one, goes that when Herb Kohler first asked Pete Dye to design a links-like course by the shores of Lake Michigan in Wisconsin, it was memories of his golfing trips to Ireland that were foremost in his mind.

"He showed me the piece of property and said, 'I want to strive for something like Royal Portrush and Ballybunion . . . make it as close to that as you can'," recalled Dye, adding: "We just kept plugging away at it."

Of course, in the great scheme of things, and certainly when it comes to "plugging away", as he put it, money helps in these matters and there was no shortage of greenbacks to help the designer on his way.

But Kohler's infatuation with Irish golf extended beyond the attempt to duplicate the sand dunes of his holiday experiences.

For 12 months of the year, an Irish flag flies alongside the American stars and stripes outside a clubhouse that he strove to make as authentic as the course.

For instance, the drains in the men's locker rooms are replicas of 19th-century Irish drains. And, although the building is only six years old, it resembles an old Irish manor house from the 1800s.

When it was being built, Kohler told the workers to turn the rough, unfinished side of the whitewashed stones out to give the building a more natural look.

Anyone driving out from Milwaukee - some 60 miles away, and the nearest metropolitan area to the town of Kohler where Whistling Straits this week plays host to the US PGA Championship - does not have to use their imagination to work out what land was here prior to Dye moving in with his earth-movers and tens of thousands of truckloads of sand.

Once flat and featureless and strewn with toxic waste and illegal dumpsites, the transformation of the land must surely rate as one of the great accomplishments in modern day golf construction.

It took Kohler's vision, the resources of his company, and 170,000 dump-truck loads of quarried sand and Dye's considerable skills to pull it off.

Kohler's 36-hole Blackwolf Run complex had already earned a reputation as one of the top golf destinations in America when he started thinking about an encore.

On numerous golfing holidays to Ireland, he had loved the rugged land, the salt spray in his face and the ambience of the 19th hole and he decided he would try to duplicate all this in Wisconsin. He'd played most of the so-called links course in the States and found them to be imperfect imitations of the Irish and Scottish links courses and his mandate to Dye was to recreate the playing conditions of those links as closely as geography, climate and land conditions would permit.

"The courses in Ireland are not carefully chiselled and they're not manicured like we manicure them in America," said Kohler.

"They're rough hewn, the grasses are very natural."

So it is that the course at Whistling Straits is unlike any other in the US, even if it is not a links in the truest sense of the word.

"There aren't many trees out there and the wind will be a factor," agreed US Tour veteran Joe Durant, "and they're calling Whistling Straits a links because of that, no trees and wind and a lot of heather and dunes . . . but you're still probably going to have to fly the ball to the greens. It's going to be different in that way."

But it is different to other American courses. There is no real estate development at Whistling Straits, so the only things a player sees are fairways, greens, sand and water (with Lake Michigan visible from all 18 holes).

It is a walking-only course (for green fees, which are $255 a round) and green fees must use caddies, some of whom have actually been brought in from Ireland.

There are no golf buggy paths and the foot trails between greens and tees are narrow ribbons that snake through the mounds and add to the authentic feel.

Kohler even imported several dozen Scottish Blackface sheep which roam the course and graze in the rough, but they've been dispatched to their winter grazing ground (ahead of schedule) so that they won't be around this week as players go in search of the season's final major.

The story of the evolution of this string of golf courses close by Lake Michigan is a fascinating one, with its connection with the Kohler Company.

In the latter half of the 19th Century, Austrian immigrant John Michael Kohler bought a small foundry in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, and set about making cast-iron ploughs and other agricultural implements for local farmers.

It also made decorative cast-iron furniture and other ornamental iron castings and then also moved into plumbing, building baths and toilets. Indeed, the Kohler Design Centre is in the grounds of the golf resort and is known as the Toilet Museum.

These days, the Kohler Co - who also diversified into adding electric generators to the mix - is a $3 billion enterprise that has nearly 50 plants in 13 countries, with its headquarters remaining in Kohler, the town (population 2,000) that it gave its name to, and where the American Club, where Whistling Straits is one of four golf courses, is located.

The site of the course is along two miles of Lake Michigan shoreline just north of Sheboygan and the land was once the site of Camp Haven, leased to the US Army in 1949 and used as an anti-aircraft firing centre for 10 years.

Later, it was purchased by the Wisconsin Electric Power Company, which targeted it as a possible site for a nuclear power plant.

In 1995, the Kohler Co completed a complicated land acquisition agreement with the power company to obtain the 560 acres of prime lake-front property with the company agreeing to work closely with government agencies to restore the natural ecosystem to the land.

High up on the list of priorities were cleaning up the waste left behind by the US military and stabilising and restoring the shoreline.

What materialised once the bull dozers and dumper trucks of sand moved in was a landscape unlike any other around Lake Wisconsin and, this week, the world's best golfers will play a course with 1,400-pluse bunkers and longer than any other in the history of major championships.

"The length of the course is going to be a factor," said Steve Friedlander, the general manager and director of golf for the Kohler Co. "But I don't think it is going to be the biggest factor when it comes to scoring.

"If the wind blows and a guy is not on his game, he could definitely shoot a real high number. And it is so rare that we don't have a day without wind out here."

The prevailing wind at this time of year is out of the south or southwest, but a stiff breeze off Lake Michigan isn't out of the question. The wind often changes direction abruptly and temperatures can drop significantly in a short time span.

"The winds starts shifting and the course will change," said Dye. "You could play five holes and think it is the most blissful thing you've ever seen and then on the next three holes you'll think the world's come to an end."

Which is just how golfers, on any given day, have felt on links courses like Ballybunion and Ballyliffin, or Lahinch and Carne. So, in a way, Herb Kohler's dream to recreate a taste of Irish links in the American Mid-West has become as close to reality as it can be.

One thing his money can't buy, however, is the taste of salt spray. For that, he'll have to make the journey back to true links in Ireland; and that has never proven to be too hard a hardship.