Golf has been played on this ground since 1885. The game’s vocabulary hasn’t been the same since.

The club was founded in 1885 as the United Services Golf Club, for Army and Navy officers stationed around Portsmouth — the greatest naval harbour in the world, a short pull across the water. The original layout ran over Haslar Common and the glacis of Fort Monckton: golf played on military ground, between the guns and the sea.

The course still lives on that ground. Fort Monckton still watches over the 17th that bears its name, the 18th — Lunette — is named for the fort’s outworks, and the old defensive earthworks still decide which way your ball kicks.

In 1893 the ladies of Alverstoke established a course of their own beside the Services ground — eight years after the men, and decades ahead of much of English golf. Around 1900 the two courses merged into a single eighteen-hole layout, and the combined club took the shape it still has: one course, shared ground, everybody plays.

More than a hundred and thirty years on, the arrangement they started still stands: the women’s card carries its own pars and stroke indices over the same eighteen holes.

The twentieth century kept redrawing the map. Fort drainage schemes and the infilling of sections of moat altered old holes; sales of Ministry of Defence land trimmed the boundaries. The club answered with an old links solution: eighteen tees serving eleven greens — seven greens doing double duty, four holes keeping greens of their own. What survives is not a compromise but a signature; there is no routing like it on this coast.

Shortly before the Second World War the club took its present name — Gosport & Stokes Bay Golf Club — as membership opened beyond the services to the town around it. The salt-air military inheritance stayed; the mess-room formality went.

The club marked its centenary in 1985 — a hundred years of golf on the point. Today it is a Community Amateur Sports Club, owned by no investor and answerable to nobody but its members.

The recently refurbished clubhouse looks down the 18th and out to the water — live music on Fridays, honours boards on the walls, silverware in the cabinet that the United Services officers would recognise. The honours boards themselves deserve a page of their own; it is being compiled.

One hundred and forty years on, the essential facts hold: 5,810 yards, par 70, eleven greens, one wind — and a course that still asks whether you can beat the Colonel.