Some time before she ventured into serious golf writing with the Daily Telegraph, Lewine Mair was quite an accomplished practitioner of the Royal and Ancient game. Indeed she gained selection on the English Girls' team for three successive years and played an unofficial, senior international against France.

Now, from a position on the other side the fairway ropes, she delights in recounting a particularly charming story about a match she played against another young woman. As it happened, Mair was having a highly productive day with her putter.

Eventually, after yet another putt had found the target, the opponent, positively irate, turned to her and said: "If you do that once more, I shall slap your face."

From as early as 1567, when Mary, Queen of Scots laid claim to becoming the first female golfer by playing in the fields beside Seton a few days after the death of her husband, Lord Darnley, women have clearly enriched the game, albeit unintentionally at times.

Earlier this year, for instance, a 71-year-old Illinois woman drowned on a course at Fort Myers, Florida, when the buggy she was driving veered off a steep slope into a pond. Sadly, Margaret Scott didn't know how to swim and as the buggy sank quickly, her husband and other golfers were unable to rescue her. Divers were unable to pull her from the water until about 20 minutes after she went in, by which stage there was no chance of reviving her.

Florida was also the scene of a decidedly bizarre tragedy in 1952. Again, it happened in March, this time in Jacksonville where two women golfers were killed instantly when hit by a US Navy fighter plane.

They were playing together when the out-of-control aircraft, with a dead engine, hit them from behind. The pilot, who had been making a test flight from the Navy air station adjoining the golf course, stepped out of the burning plane and didn't know for several seconds that the women had been killed.

Yet again in Florida, misfortunes have happened to women golfers away from the course. In January of this year, tournament professional Kim Williams broke a collarbone and injured her right knee in a car crash after shooting an opening, level-par 72 in an LPGA Tour event at Grand Cypress Resort.

What made the accident especially newsworthy in the US was that it revived memories of 1994 when Williams was hit in the neck by a bullet while walking into a drugstore during another tournament, this time in Ohio. Fortunately, the bullet didn't cause major injury. In fact she finished 10th in the Toledo Classic the following week.

According to Curiosities of Golf by Jonathan Rice, the most famous ghost associated with the game is that of Marianne, Countess de Morella, who is reputed to haunt the clubhouse at Wentworth. Shortly after her death from a riding accident in 1924 at the age of 93, the Wentworth Estate, which had been her family home for three-quarters of a century, was sold.

That was when the celebrated English architect, Harry Colt, was commissioned to design the gentle East Course, followed by the more formidable West, later to become known at the Burma Road. The countess's old home, including the ballroom, became the clubhouse.

Extensive refurbishment was undertaken in 1993 at a cost of £10 million but we are told that almost immediately, fences started collapsing mysteriously while piles of concrete blocks were overturned. And all the while, there were reports of a ghostly figure appearing in the corridors of the clubhouse.

Eventually, it took a visit from the Marquesa de Ter, great-granddaughter of the countess, to placate the old, departed lady. It seems she was upset that things were no longer under her control.

Then there is Muffin Spencer-Devlin, who caused an uproar in the US when, in a Sports Illustrated interview in 1996, she became the first LPGA professional to come out publicly as a lesbian. Some of her peers reacted: "Well, that's Muffin blowing the lid off." But she was defended by Swedish professional Helen Alfredsson, who told Sports Illustrated: "If you dare to be happy, people should accept that."

Spencer-Devlin is a fascinating character, however, not for her sexuality but for having golf's most vivid imagination. She tells tales of reincarnation, of having had former lives as King Arthur, as a black Matabele king, as a Samurai warrior and an 18th century stevedore on the Liverpool docks.

"I saw several psychiatrists and went into three different mental homes," she admitted to author Liz Kahn in the book The LPGA: The Unauthorized Version. "I was drinking and taking drugs; I would sometimes take lithium to stabilise my condition, then I would chuck it. I muddled through, I couldn't cope and one time I flew off to London for a month, saw a show every night and then went home even more depressed."

Reflecting on her time in the mini-tour in the US, she went on: "They accepted me out there, which was for me a much needed thing. So I could come out of being crazy. The film One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest was so very close to what it had been like for me."

Later, a nutrition expert described her as having a classic case of low blood-sugar and after vitamins and a special diet, her manic state receded. By her own admission, however, she remained apprehensive for at least a further six months. Meanwhile, nutrition and health foods led her into EST and Scientology, with some interesting results.

"I was finding real things that had happened to me," said Spencer-Devlin. "I explored reincarnation further and when I was visiting England, I was convinced that I had been King Arthur in a previous life. In South Africa, my connection was with a very big, black Matabele king who ruled with a rod of iron and while in Japan, I was sure that I had been a Samurai warrior."

And there are instances of physical as well as moral courage from golf's distaff side.

Like the occasion in 1976 when, during a particularly hot summer in Britain, there were many incidents of fires on golf courses, especially in the Dorset and Hampshire areas. During a women's medal at Ferndown, firemen were called out to deal with an outbreak on the 15th and 16th holes.

Wearing sophisticated breathing apparatus, they were astonished to find two women emerging from the smoke wearing handkerchief masks.

Finally, we are informed that women's involvement in the game took a particularly interesting turn in the 18th century. That was when Margaret Ross of Balneil, wife of the Earl of Stair of Lochinch Castle, Stranraer, was reputed to be a witch with "terrifying powers". It seems her specialty was to turn herself into a golf ball and hop unbidden into the deepest recesses of the largest bunkers, just to annoy her opponents.

Another ploy while in golf-ball mode, was to deliberately move off-line on the greens, so as to prevent people she disliked from winning. Could it be that she was responsible, at a distance of 200 years, for the remarkable putting contrasts in Mair's match? It's a fascinating thought.