Located on the increasingly popular South Korean island of Jeju, the Raon Golf Club was designed by IMG Golf Course Services, supposedly with assistance from European Tour stalwart Colin Montgomerie. The course opened in 2004 to great fanfare, with an exhibition skins game played between ‘designer’ Montgomerie, World number 1 Tiger Woods and Korean stars KJ Choi and Si Re Pak.

The club continues to trade off the fact it hosted such a prestigious foursome, and visitors are constantly reminded of the day, with bizarre flags and plaques dotted across the course marking where each of the professionals played from. These flags even appear in the bunkers!

Sadly, the quality of the golf course doesn’t match the quality of the opening rounds, with little new or original here in terms of and a number of poor holes. Hard to imagine Montgomerie having much to do with a hole like the Lake 7^th, a long all-or-nothing water carry par five that horseshoes around a lake and offers no option other than a smash across the water. Lake 5 is another odd water holes, that suggests through design golfers actually play well away from the lake. Elsewhere, the difficult holes tend to be narrow and heavily bunkered, and while some of the shaping is reasonably good none of the holes are especially attractive or memorable.