AS PHILIP 'Captain' Kirk, owner of Dundalk's newest hotel, golf course and leisure complex, takes to the skies, it's hard to imagine that the space which now houses his helipad was once home to his tractor.

Harder still to imagine is that the meticulously manicured fairways and greens of his surrounding 18-hole golf course was once a working farm.

"Here," says Philip, pointing to the first fairway, "is where I used to dose the cattle.

"And over there," he waves in the direction of the state-of-the-art swimming pool and leisure complex, "is where the house used to be."

The house to which he refers to is the family home, a rare, 11-bedroom Victorian gem demolished to make way for the his magnificent new 84-bedroom hotel.

So how did he feel when the bulldozers arrived? Wasn't he even a tiny bit, well, terrified?

He chortles at the very idea.

"I didn't think twice about it!" he replies, "When you're young, you don't think. You just DO."

For a fellow who by his own admission hated school and couldn't wait to get out of it, this baby-faced 30-year-old's achievements to date have been by any standards remarkable.

Having suffered the premature loss of his father, young Kirk abandoned formal education at 13 to run the family farm, a substantial holding of well over 100 acres.

But for all that the land might have been worth, it quickly became obvious to Kirk that his childhood dream of owning a helicopter would never come true on the fruits of farm labouring.

It was the economic upturn of the 1990s that first gave him idea of transforming the lot into a top-of-the-range hotel, golf and leisure complex.

"For the first time in years people had money in their pockets," he explains. "Leisure and luxury were the new buzz words."

For Kirk, to think was to act: almost overnight bulldozers had replaced farm machinery and builders' portakabins stood where the byres had once been.

As the lush, arable acres of Carnbeg farm were being transformed into the manicured greens of today, and the magnificent new hotel was rising from the ruins of his old farmhouse, Kirk was nursing even more ambitious plans.

Dream

"Ever since I was a child I'd dreamed of owning a helicopter," he confesses, "but like everything else around here it would have to earn its keep. And now it dawned on me that the hotel could provide it."

Philip had hit on the notion of offering couples booking their wedding reception in his hotel a unique mode of transport on their Big Day.

As he points out: "Any bride and groom can have a limo nowadays. But how many can hop out of a helicopter?!"

Kirk's novel attraction is now proving such a draw with punters he's had wedding bookings from all over Ireland.

"With its new infrastructure, Dundalk is no longer the out-of-the-way spot it once was," he says.

"The hotel, leisure complex and golf course offers direct access onto the new Western bypass, leaving Dublin and Belfast literally just down the road.

With the troubles thankfully consigned to history, people are now discovering all that this area has to offer and its natural beauty has to be seen to be believed."

Quite.

And what better place to see it than from a helicopter - with Captain Kirk at the controls, naturally.

BY MARGARET CARRAGHER