"PERDITA couldn't wait to leave her dreary school and become a polo player. The polo set were ritzy, wild and gloriously promiscuous. Perdita thought she'd get along with them very well."

We are sitting around the kitchen table in Thom Bell's Perthshire farmhouse to eat fine food and quaff excellent wine after a hard morning's session on the basics of the game of kings. One of Scotland's leading polo players and coaches, Bell is playing mine host to perfection and turns not a hair when I recite the words of well-bred and supposedly well-informed author Jilly Cooper's description of the world he inhabits in her best-selling novel about the sport.

"She's right," he says, a glint in his eye, "and she has probably done us a service. Except you could probably take everything she writes and times it by two. Polo is one of the most heterosexual sports in the world. Good-looking, fit men and pretty girls. It has to be great fun."
There are nervous giggles around the table from the ladies present. We are here on a learn-to-play-polo day and the glitz has disappeared a little in the dank drizzle falling outside. The only wildness so far has come from the raw westerly wind and if there's going to be any promiscuity, it hasn't happened yet. Lunch despatched, Bell pulls back his chair, pulls on his tweed cap and beckons towards the door. "Come on," he says, "time for a chukka."

Everyone has their own vision of the polo world, but for most it conjures up a well-to-do coterie of Henrys and Henriettas on horseback, downing champagne at post-match cocktail parties while waiting for Daddy's limousine to turn up. Impossibly handsome Argentinian polo professionals and pampered princes strut in tight white breeches before willing debutantes, carried away by the reek of expensive leather, manly sweat and gigantic bank balances.

Given the perceived cost, it's not a scene the ordinary Joe has fitted into, but gradually that appears to be changing. Scotland has three main polo clubs and up to 200 players, with numbers doubling over the last five years. The country has its own team, which competes in internationals, and even what passes for a youth policy – new clubs at St Andrews, Aberdeen and Stirling universities.

On Saturday, one of the highlights of the polo calendar north of the border will take place, with the Polo at the Palace event at Scone, outside Perth. Teams from all clubs – Dundee and Perth, Dalmahoy (near Edinburgh) and the Border Reivers – will mount their ponies and go head-to-head before a crowd that is expected to number in the thousands. Polo is also becoming popular for hen nights and corporate events, a sure sign that the sport is making the difficult crossing into the mainstream.

The 44-year-old Bell only took the game up himself a decade ago, but he has seen the character of the sport alter even in that short period. "It used to be populated by army officers – it was seen as a noble pursuit in the cavalry – but that is beginning to change. There are people now from all walks of life taking it up and many more becoming interested in either playing or watching. The key to that has been accessibility and I hope I've been able to do my bit for that. It's also not as expensive as people might think."

A road haulier by trade, Bell, who has been riding since the age of five, has built his own polo arena at his home in North Kilduff, near Kinross. "It's a sort of five-a-side football pitch version but it's great for learning and training," he says. "I'd like to call it a business but it's more of a polo charity than anything else."

Bell's polo pitch lies out beyond the stables, with white boards encircling an all-weather surface and two goals marked at each end. It's Bell's personal field of dreams – build it and they will come. He has now teamed up with Edinburgh-based company Momentous Events to host learn-to-play sessions for individual and corporate guests.

Jo Tennant, who organises the days and is a founding member of St Andrews University Polo Club, insists even non-riders will be playing polo – albeit not to the most exacting of Argentinian standards – by the afternoon. For me, with no horse-riding experience to speak of, it is a major leap of faith.

I have never really liked horses, get very nervous when close to them and have occasionally ridden only the tamest of beasts while on family holidays. Anyone reassured by the term 'polo pony' – I was for a few seconds – is in for a rude shock. These are proper horses with a toughness of spirit and turn of speed that has them rightly labelled the Ferraris of the equine world.

Everyone starts in 'the pit', a wire-mesh enclosure where potential stars may well begin their polo career. Inside stands the wooden horse. Handed the distinctive 50-inch polo stick, you mount, lean out and down and try to hit the static ball. Natural talents get it straight away: the ball moves forward up off curved boards directly ahead and back towards the horse where the whole process can start again. Un-naturals, like me, swipe and miss a few times before any sort of contact is made.
"How hard is it with a static horse and a static ball?" asks Bell, who is in the pit with you and who's had to become practised at avoiding wildly swinging sticks. "Then imagine how hard it is on a galloping horse when the ball is moving." You start to get a feeling for how truly skilled good polo players are.

Then it's out on to the pitch without a horse, learning the feel and rhythm of swinging the stick. Only then do you get to meet your mount. As ever, Bell is alert to the equestrian virgins. He selects for me the ironically named Wild Thing the Third. Now 22 and getting on, she was once one of the best polo ponies in Europe but is now semi-retired and more used to taking children for rides. For me, she's perfect.

Once mounted, we seem to get on fine; she appears to know what she's doing without any help from me. We walk, we trot, we even canter a little. At gentle paces like this, and with our own ball to play with, I even manage to swing the stick and hit a few shots in a forward direction. Then it's lunchtime and that Jilly Cooper reading.

Fortified by food and drink and after a session on safety and tactics, it's time to mount up again, this time in full polo gear of tight white jeans, full-length riding boots, leather knee pads, polo shirt and polo helmet. I may not be able to play polo but at least I can try to look the part as the 'chukka' – there are normally four to six chukkas per game, each lasting seven and a half minutes – gets under way.

We are split into two teams of four, with Bell refereeing. We line up facing each other and it's time for the throw-in. The ball skids across and the riders all attempt to get there first. The better riders manoeuvre their ponies into position and the game is under way. It's a maelstrom of hooves, flying sticks and noise, and the ball comes my way. I turn Wild Thing but too slowly and the ball is away and down the other end of the pitch before I have even blinked.

It's a pattern repeated over the next ten minutes but when I do get on the end of a pass and the ball goes in the right direction, there's an undeniable surge of adrenaline. It's easy to forget you are riding a horse because the only objective in mind is to hit the ball. Largely, though, Wild Thing and I are spectators; my lack of horsemanship is beginning to tell.

Frustrated, and wanting to get into the thick of the action, I dig my heels hard into Wild Thing's side. Suddenly, from some recesses of her mind, she remembers she is a Ferrari and sets off at what feels like an alarming speed towards the mêlée up front. The inevitable happens: I pull her up sharply with my weight too far forward and I crash off and on to the pitch. I scramble up, everything but pride unhurt, but my beautifully white jeans are now a muddy-brown. This would never have happened to a Jilly Cooper hero.

Bell canters up. "Did I hear you asking to dismount?" he asks innocently. "Because if you didn't, it means the drinks are on you afterwards."

I remount Wild Thing and get back to the game. Jilly would have expected nothing less. When, towards the end, I'm gifted a pass and an open goal, I even manage to persuade my thoroughbred to trot forward and I prod the ball weakly between the posts. My team-mates generously applaud and I feel ridiculously pleased with myself.

It is a game that hooks its aficionados with ever-increasing ferocity. Gaynor Hutton, a former GB show-jumping international who now lives in East Ayrshire, started her polo career two years ago. After quitting the show ring and making her way in business, she realised how much she was missing regular contact with horses.

"I gave up show-jumping because I just developed different priorities," she says. "But I was missing the horses and needed a substitute. I had never tried polo but had always quite fancied it. Obviously, the riding wasn't a problem and as far as I was concerned it was a matter of 'there's a ball, go for it'. It's the rules I find the hardest part."
She soon graduated from training matches to competitive fixtures and took part in a ladies' competition at Ascot last year. Having a natural tendency to get "stuck in" to her chosen sports, Hutton has the scars to prove it. "I am frustrated by my own lack of progress and try to do major moves I have no hope of pulling off. I was playing in one game where I got too close and a horse's head swung round, hit me and knocked some of my teeth out. All part of the fun."

Dundee and Perth is Scotland's oldest polo club, started in 1965 on the Earl of Dundee's Birkhill Estate in Fife but moving in 1972 to the middle of the racecourse at Scone Palace. The newest club is the Border Reivers, started by businessman Will Ramsay in 2003. He has built his pitch – the size of eight football fields – on a picturesque site near Greenlaw, facing the Cheviot Hills.

Ramsay, who as an ex-army officer can't really avoid the stereotype, however unfair, has ten resident polo ponies, an Argentinian groom to look after them and has hired an professional from Argentina to give lessons during the summer. "I learned to play in the army and wanted to play again when I came back to Scotland. It's more of a club than an enterprise and more and more people want to give it a go," he says. "Most people, when they think of polo, have heard about rich patrons throwing money at the sport. That does exist but there is another, lower level."

The Border Reivers have ponies for hire, as does Bell at North Kilduff. "Polo only used to be accessible to those with time and lots of money. But now, if people want to come along for a day and take a look, we can cater for that," he says. "The days when you needed to own five ponies just to get started are long gone."

Dundee and Perth Polo Club (www.scottishpolo.com); Border Reivers (www.borderspolo.com)