Vic Robbie discovers that there is more to the land of ice and fire. With 60 golf courses, the visiting golfer can play and party throughout the night

IT’S a favourite saying of the locals on Iceland’s Westman Islands - “We never know when something’s going to come up” – and it’s usually followed by a wry smile for there’s been quite a bit coming up over the years.

The spectacular Heimaey island is a 20-minute hop south of Iceland’s bustling capital of Reykjavik and the islanders have experienced some strange occurrences that demonstrate the awesome force of nature.

In 1963 the world’s newest island, now named Surtsey, simply appeared out of the water pushed up by the activity of the tectonic plates deep under the Atlantic Ocean. However it was one night ten years later that showed how precarious our tenancy of this planet is when a volcano erupted with almighty power sending flaming boulders from deep below the earth’s crust shooting thousands of feet into the sky. Molten lava streamed down from the newly formed Fire Mountain towards the town of Vestmannaeyjar, engulfing 400 homes.

The eruptions lasted for more than five months and the town was covered by 20 million tons of ash, which rose 12 feet above the rooftops.

A one-mile long fissure opened up and many craters appeared yet miraculously all 5,000 inhabitants were evacuated without a fatality even though one foolish soul decided to stay on, that was until a red-hot rock smashed through his window and burned straight through his dining table.

Even now, more than 30 years later, Fire Mountain still steams and simmers and the ground is hot enough to bake bread, and homes are being dug out of the ash earning the island the soubriquet of the ‘Pompeii of the North’.

Iceland straddles a submarine ridge and has the mid-Atlantic rift running through it, yet the inhabitants are pretty sanguine about when or if nature decides to exert its influence again.

They love to tell tales of heroic escapades, fishermen swimming through mountainous icy seas, scaling hundred feet high cliffs and traversing miles of glaciers to rescue their colleagues, and then there was the time quite recently when an Atlantic storm deposited fish on the land and the locals went fishing in the town’s high street.

Ask anyone what they know about Iceland and they might come up with the bizarre pop chanteuse, Björk, or the former Chelsea striker, Eidur Gudjohnsen, or Jón Páll Sigmarsson, once the world’s strongest man.

Then they might add fishing - the locals refer to the pong of fish as the ‘smell of money’ - the land of the midnight sun and Reykjavik, one of the world’s clubbing hotspots. But golf? It doesn’t appear on the radar.

So it is something of a surprise that this remarkable and almost treeless landscape is home to 60 golf courses with more being built – namely the Black Sand course designed by Nick Faldo.

With a population of around 270,000, there are more golf holes per capita than anywhere in the world. And it is possible to play around the clock with many visitors teeing off in bright sunshine at midnight during the summer and then hitting the Reykjavik night clubs and bars which stay open until 6am.

Lava rock, spectacular scenery and the pounding Atlantic Ocean play a major part in most of Iceland’s golf courses, which are not crowded, reasonably priced and, most of important of all, provide a good and different test of golfing ability.

One of the most challenging and attractive is the course at Vestmannaeyja on Heimaey Island, which perhaps unsurprisingly nestles in an 11,000-year-old crater. It’s the venue in July for the Volcano Open, sponsored by Icelandair, and attracts so much interest from golfers around the world who are keen to experience midnight golf that the organisers are hoping to expand the format to attract even more entries.

If you can tear your eyes away from the towering, jagged sides of the crater, which in summer are home to thousands of birds including puffins, guillemot and razorbills, the course demands concentration.

Opened in 1938, it’s the third oldest course in Iceland. The front nine are in the crater and the back nine, opened in 1994, run along the shores of the Atlantic. The island is several degrees warmer than the mainland and although the 300 members usually play throughout the winter it’s not fully operational for the season until April and is always the first course to open in Iceland in the spring.

This is a typical links with no trees and with hard and fast fairways, undulating between mounds and occasional outcrops of lava rock. In the winter the rough goes dormant and yellow but in the summer it is allowed to grow and encroach on the playing area. There are a number of challenging holes but the pick would be the 525-yard 16th, which doglegs left alongside the ocean with lava rock and a pond awaiting the under-struck approach, and the 17th, a par-three played 152 yards across the ocean.

As with any links, the wind is a major player and being in a crater it funnels in so that it seems to be in front of you and behind you at the same time.

Green fees are 6,000 krona, approximately £47, and the club offers a special deal for those wanting to come out to the island for a day trip – 9,000 krona (£70) for a return flight plus a game of golf.

The golf season lasts until October and although the temperature never rises above 20 degrees, even in the height of summer, it can be light all night. But in the winter it’s a different story with seemingly endless dark days although the ingenuity of the Icelanders to cope with their environment could be a lesson to the rest of us who are stymied by the ‘wrong kind of snow’.

In the cosmopolitan capital of Reykjavik, they pump hot water under the pavements to keep them clear of snow and they have even created their own geothermal beach, enclosing the bay, importing white sand, and pumping in hot water so that the temperature stays at a steady 20 degrees. But then Iceland has an abundance of hot water and steam escaping from a landscape dotted with geysers and thermal springs so much so that the most popular pastime is congregating for a chat with friends at the numerous steam baths and outdoor swimming pools known as hot pots.

Second to that could be golf. With so many golf courses, you are never more than an hour’s drive from a course – and five per cent of the population are playing members with 35,000 Icelanders playing five times or more a year.

Most clubs don’t demand to see handicap certificates before allowing visitors to play, and Hortur Thorsteinsson, Secretary General of the Golf Union of Iceland, says: “We have tried to make it a people’s sport, no class, not aristocratic and cheap (£40) to play. Access for everyone is good.”

In the Reykjavik area, golfers are well served with nine good courses. Iceland’s oldest, Reykjavik Golf Club, boasts two challenging courses and even with a staggering 2,500 members, paying around £500 a year, still has a waiting list. Formed in 1934, it also has one of the best practice facilities in Iceland with three-storey driving bays, a nine-hole course and a huge white clubhouse.

The Korpulfsstadir course is the pick of the two. Not long at 6,035 metres (6,638 yards) but it winds down to and along the Atlantic where the prevailing winds from the south tend to be wet and the north winds cold and dry. The 220-yard third is a super short hole playing down to the ocean with a salmon river running all the way down the right.

Inland, The Odd Fellow Golf Club’s par-71, 5,979-metre (6,577 yards) course is well worth a visit with views over the surrounding countryside. The club, which is involved in many charitable works locally, is planning to increase their layout to three loops of nine holes.

Without doubt Keilir, 40 years old this year and a 10-minute drive from the city centre, is one of the most attractive courses in Iceland. From the clubhouse high above the course and overlooking the Atlantic the two nines could not be more different. The front nine was built on a thousand-year-old lava field with no bunkers, while the back nine is a typical links.

Perched out in the ocean, the 11th is likened to Pebble Beach while the18th has Scottish-style bunkers around the green. This is where the Icelandic Championship is played and the par-71, 5,904-metre (6,494 yards) course has also hosted the Canon pro-am – attracting players of the calibre of Retief Goosen and Padraig Harrington.

Equally impressive is the club’s new practice area with a covered driving range where the doors to the bays open individually so that even in the fiercest winds you are protected, and a magnificent indoor practice facility including an 18-hole putting green and a bunker and chipping areas – all built in the pool that was once home to Keiko, the killer whale of Free Willy fame.

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