Brandon Skidmore’s nan bought him a golf set for his fourth birthday and there have been many happy returns ever since.

Now 11, the Brickhampton Court youngster plays off 10 and there is plenty of time to get that handicap down even further, of course.

And despite his tender years, young Brandon already knows what he wants to do when he is older… become a professional golfer.

That may not be as a fanciful as it sounds with Alan Kirk, the junior organiser at Brickhampton and a former second team county player with Derbyshire, saying: “I think he’s got the potential to go all the way. He’s 100 per cent dedicated and practises whenever he can.

“I think he played golf every day this summer. At the very least he’ll be a top amateur.”

That’s high praise indeed from a 63-year-old who has been playing the game for more than 50 years and still has a handicap of 12, even though he says with a laugh: “It’s like my age, it’s only going upwards!”

Brandon’s mum Katie doesn’t play golf but she remembers those days in February 2010 soon after her oldest son’s fourth birthday.

“He started hitting balls in the garden,” she chuckled, “but his shots were in the air and had a perfect trajectory. We had to stop him playing in the garden otherwise we’d have had no windows left!”

So they took Brandon to Gloucester Golf Club on Sunday mornings where he impressed everyone with his talent.

“His shots were perfect and the people at the club said he was a natural golfer,” said Katie. “They didn’t try to teach him, they just let him play.”

Some of that talent has obviously come from dad Tristram, a member at Brickhampton who plays off four.

It wasn’t long before Brandon was heading to Brickhampton himself where he was a regular on the nine-hole course.

And it wasn’t just in Churchdown that he was wowing people who know their golf.

“He started playing on the British Junior Golf Tour and won the Wee Wonders at St Andrews at the age of six,” said Katie. “Everyone knew he was. He played on the GM Golf Tour and used to win his age categories and qualified for tournaments in the US.”

A trip across the pond was a trip too far for Brandon’s parents who nevertheless continued to ferry him all over the country as he honed his golfing excellence.

When he was nine he was given a handicap of 28 which meant he could play on the 18-hole course at Brickhampton, and in the past couple of years he has trod almost every blade of grass of the 200-acre complex.

“He plays golf every day whether it’s in school term time or during the holidays,” said Katie. “In the summer he plays nine holes every night and in the winter he’s on the driving range.”

He’s obviously a very good all-rounder player but driving is his strength. “He’s very, very straight off the tee,” said his proud mum.

And while his golf obviously looks the part, the young Brandon wants to make sure he looks the part too.

“He’s obsessed with golf bags,” laughed Katie. “He won’t have anything other than TaylorMade. He must be on his seventh or eighth golf set now.”

Brandon, who lives in Kingsway and is a pupil at Severn Vale School, is now old enough – and good enough – to play with his dad and they compete together in the North Gloucestershire Foursomes League. They also teamed up to win the club’s Leith Plate two years, in a row and Brandon is the club’s current junior champion.

Throw in a tournament win at Henbury where he shot the best overall gross score of 72 and a net 60, plus the fact that he’s holed in one the first hole of Brickhampton’s nine-hole course and has been playing for Gloucestershire’s under-14s for the past two years and it’s clear that there is a very serious golfer in the making here.

So how far can he go in the sport?

“He’s still very young,” said Katie. “A lot of things can change at secondary school but he wants to be a tour professional. You have to be realistic, the competition is very hard at the elite level. We’ll just have to see how it goes.”