Country Diary: Dorset

Parkstone golf club has long preserved and nurtured a surviving stretch of heath and wetland hemmed in by residential suburbs and lying at sea level near Poole harbour. Swans breed on the lake by the first hole. When they flew away last October, one weak cygnet was left behind. Golfers and neighbours fed it and it survived. Now its parent family has returned, rejected it and tried to drown it, but it has escaped to another smaller lake.

Ashley Wood golf club is on different terrain, high up on chalk downs above Blandford, and close to the iron age hill fort of Badbury Rings. The club works in cooperation with English Heritage as custodian of land where archaeological treasures may lie just below the surface. Wild flowers flourish (there is a notable carpet of bluebells in May) and deer browse in the woods. It is different again at Sherborne golf club, further north on what used to be agricultural land near the Somerset border. Down in a lovely hollow by the 17th green, crowds of rooks make a raucous clamour in the treetops, while at the seventh hole pheasants, fugitives from the neighbouring killing fields, stalk the fairway. New trees are being planted in strategic places, two areas are beings prepared for seedings of wild flowers, and new buddleias attract butterflies. Interaction with wildlife is generally, if not always, benign; when badgers ripped up the whole length of a fairway they were discouraged by the erection of an electric fence. Sensitive course management can "increase habitat variety, enhance biodiversity, and protect delicate and rare habitats such as dune and heathland," claims the Royal and Ancient, golf's governing body, on its website. The numbers of green woodpeckers at Broadstone, also an island of heath near Bournemouth, are another happy example.