Spring is in the air, the days are getting longer and even the most hapless swingers of a golf club are shaking off the rust, dusting down the sticks and easing themselves back into the kind of murderous swipings that would have been more effective at the Battle of Bosworth.

For many of the good women on the Ladies European Tour, though, the move towards the traditional golfing season remains a stuttering, uncertain process. There have been five events on the circuit in Australia and South Africa but the tour’s well-documented struggles are not going to be cured overnight. For Scottish golfer Kelsey MacDonald, the diary is looking pretty sparse.

“We are supposed to be getting an email next week from the tour about our schedule but from what I have heard it’s not looking good,” she said. “Between the event in Morocco in April and the Scottish Open, it doesn’t look like we will have any events. That’s the middle of April until the end of July. That’s a huge gap. I’m just hoping the end of the season will be jam packed like it was last year. I thought it would be better. There was talk there would be more events in Europe but it does take years to build relationships.”

The contrast between the haves and the have-nots is stark. The Ladies Scottish Open is a lucrative, co-sanctioned event with the LPGA Tour. The problem for the likes of MacDonald is that they have to try to go toe-to-toe with some of the best players in the world having had little opportunity to build up any competitive momentum.

“You just have to stay positive and try to be competitive when you can,” she said. “It’s especially difficult at the Scottish Open as the LPGA Tour girls come in having played something like something like seven weeks in a row. That’s very hard for us to compete against girls who are playing week in week out.”

After a barren first half of the campaign, the Ladies European Tour does build up a head of steam with a jam-packed end to the season but that brings its own problems for lightly-raced competitors.

“It’s tough trying to produce a performance,” said MacDonald. “At the end of last year we had so many events in a row. That’s great but ideally you want to be able to pick your events. You’d like so many on, then a week off, then another couple, like the men. They can pick and choose so they know they can perform. Being away for eight weeks on the trot all of a sudden last year was hard.”

MacDonald, who can at least content herself with valuable financial backing from the Team Scottish Hydro support programme, still has lofty aims and ambitions. August’s European Team Golf Championship at Gleneagles, a joint men’s and women’s event staged as part of the wider Glasgow 2018 European Championships, is a sizeable carrot on a stick for MacDonald while the 2019 Solheim Cup, also at Gleneagles, is the ultimate, if somewhat distant, dream.

“There so many great tournaments on home turf but it’s hard when you don’t have enough events to play in to show that you are good enough,” she said.

For emerging talent, with professional ambitions, MacDonald has words of caution.

“It’s going to be so difficult for these girls coming in,” she said. “They get a card but they can’t play. You have category and you are 10th reserve for lots of events as we are co-sanctioned with a lot of events in Asia. We really need more events in Europe.”