It's taken four years, involved 25,000 working hours and has utilised global information sources, satellite mapping and on the ground contacts.

And, no, it's not the fruitless search for one of this correspondent's wayward tee-shots. It is, in fact, the tireless labour that has gone into producing the Royal & Ancient's inaugural report on golf facilities around the world.

Pieced together by the National Golf Foundation, a market research organisation based in the USA, and demonstrating the kind of meticulous attention to detail you'd tend to find in a box set of Quincy episodes, the report outlines, for the first time, the precise number of global golfing amenities in an effort to track the development of the game in every nook and cranny of the planet, from St Andrews to Sao Tome & Principe. Perhaps Alan Shepard, the Apollo 14 astronaut who famously clattered a golf ball about on the surface of the moon back in 1971, was actually carrying out long distance research work on behalf of the R&A?

Back on planet earth, meanwhile, the wide ranging study has identified that there are currently 34,011 golf facilities spread across 206 countries and of that total, 79 per cent are located in 10 countries, namely the USA, Japan, Canada, England, Australia, Germany, France, Scotland, South Africa and Sweden. The sport remains largely accessible, with 71 per cent of the total facilities being open to the public.

If you fancy a challenge, there are some 576,534 golf holes to plough through, from Azerbaijan to Zambia, via the Cocos Islands, Equatorial Guinea and, er, Mount Ellen. For every hole, there is a population of 12,570, which would be a bit of a scunner being stuck behind during your weekly fourball ... and there's no guarantee that you would get waved through either.

Here in Scotland, the country that gave the game to the world, the latest official count is 552 courses and facilities. Indeed, the home of golf is one of only eight countries with 500 or more such places for thrashing away at a little dimpled ball. Our neighbours across the out of bounds wall in England have a total of 2,084, by far the most in Europe and amounting to 28 per cent of the continent's total figure.

On a global scale, Europe accounts for 22 per cent of the world's supply with the USA dominating that particular list with 45 per cent of the total facilities. Saturation and over supply in the US - an issue that has caused problems here too as growth outweighed demand - has led to the total number of courses and facilities dropping from a peak of 16,052 to 15,373 as the market balances out.

In contrast, the emerging markets in Asia continue to grow with 30 per cent of new golf projects throughout the world taking place in this burgeoning region which has the third highest volume of golfing facilities anywhere. There is a trend in Europe, meanwhile, for the development of short, compact courses that are public and family friendly. Six, nine and 12-hole courses are becoming increasingly common as the game looks to new, flexible ways of bolstering participation and luring in juniors. In this highly developed golfing hotbed, it is estimated that there were 110 facility closures over the past five to 10 years.

While the general, worldwide supply of golfing facilities is still largely concentrated among the traditional nations, the game's global reach continues to extend into previously uncharted territory. Now, remind me where Sao Tome & Principe is again?