For those accustomed to conventional golf, the first hole at Cruit Island is trial by fire. The opening tee shot is blind, playing over a ridge to a wrinkled fairway that kicks left while bending right around a group of dunes. If you hit a solid drive, you may dent a car: the club’s access road splits the hole corridor on a diagonal. The green is framed attractively by a rock outcropping.

The most conventional par 4 at Cruit Island, No. 2 would be the most dramatic hole on many courses. The tee sits on top of the ledge that the first hole plays into, and the green is embedded in the tall family of dunes that serves as the course’s main gathering point. In between, the fairway travels down and then up a series of large undulations. This is the one time in the round that a longer player can comfortably let loose with a driver.

Another blind, disconcerting tee shot — this one over a massive dune to a stepped fairway that tumbles down to a clifftop green. Here you simply need an accurate, 210-yard shot. Anything short leaves you on top of the dune with an uncomfortably long approach, and anything long risks bounding into the sea.

Cresting the dune and seeing the green below, perched on its rocky promontory, is a capital-”M” Moment.

This tricky par 4 doglegs around a huge cavern. It’s tempting to cut the corner, but a good strike is needed to avoid a lost ball. The fallaway punchbowl green, fronted by pot bunkers and a closely mown hummock, savors of old-school links.

A companion to the second hole, the fifth tees off from the same cluster of dunes and vaults over the peak of a ridge in a similar way. From there, however, the hole differentiates itself, turning sharply right and finishing at a green benched sideways into a hill. A mid-iron and a half wedge will do the job for most players. Strategically, No. 5 is somewhat inert, but its relationship with the terrain is so striking that I don’t even care.

In his tough Confidential Guide review of Cruit Island, Tom Doak dinged this “signature” par 3 for providing too small a target. (“[I]t’s a golf hole only a geologist would love,” he wrote — admittedly a bar.) I found the green’s 30-yard-wide backboard to be generous enough, but keep in mind that I played the course on an atypically calm day.

Either way, I suspect most photographers would love this hole, too.

See “Favorite Hole” section of the course profile.

This long par 3 is, by a fair margin, Cruit Island’s plainest hole. The green just sits in a field. The putting surface itself, however, was an unexpected favorite of mine, with rippling contours that appear more found than built.

Cruit Island’s closer curves around a dune on the left, following the club’s entrance road. Take too much club, and you may end up on the beach, hidden just past the elbow of the fairway. The green tilts severely from back to front and left to right, making it difficult to get even wedge approaches close.