FAIRWAYS TO HEAVEN

Home to the Masters, the first men's Major tournament on the annual golfing calendar, the Augusta National course is as beautiful as it's fiendishly difficult. And this year, thanks to the competition's 25-year partnership with Rolex, Prestige was there to follow the action.

- JON WALL

Around 200km east of the booming metropolis of Atlanta lies the small city of Augusta. Spread out westward from the banks of the Savannah River, which here marks the boundary between the states of Georgia and South Carolina, it's a genteel southern town, slightly faded in parts and with an unfeasible preponderance (or at least to non-American eyes) of hospitals, clinics, churches and the edifices of multitudinous religious denominations, several of which, I'm sure, overlap in one great big Venn diagram. I might even have invoked the inevitable cliché "sleepy", were Augusta's peace not regularly interrupted by the rumble and roar of the supersized pick-up trucks that seem to be the preferred mode of transport in these parts and by the hundreds of thousands of golf fans, who descend upon the city from every corner of the planet for around a week-and-a-half each year, to watch and simply immerse in the unique atmosphere of the Masters, which for the past 80 years has ranked among the four leading international tournaments on the sport's annual calendar.