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Kungsbanan in Aland Golf Club is totallt different from the sister course in the same club

Slottsbanan in Aland is one very unlikely destination but it is really worth it

This one is from a different trip. Not a golf trip at all, as it happens. I was in New Zealand with my family over the New Year, and we had stopped for New Year's Eve in a town on the North Island called Napier. Napier deserves a paragraph of its own. The town was largely destroyed in 1931, when a large earthquake hit Hawke's Bay and the fires that broke out afterwards finished off most of what the quake had left standing. What makes Napier remarkable is what happened next

Dinard Golf was designed in 1887 by Tom Dunn, the Scottish architect, and is officially the second oldest course in France, after Pau, which opened in 1856. The whole place was the work of a small colony of retired British army officers who had come back from service

The drive from Dinard to Granville is about an hour and a half east into Normandy, and the last fifteen minutes of it deliver you onto what feels like the wrong country. The course at Bréville-sur-Mer is, by general agreement and by its own honest billing, the only proper links course in France. Hard sandy ground. Low dunes. A wind that won't quite leave you alone. And a piece of high ground in the distance that, to several of us at once, looked exactly like the Scottish high

It is a course held together by two holes. The whole round is fine, in places very good, in places average. But the reason anyone gets in a car and drives to Pleneuf is the tenth and the eleventh, which between them are as good a pair of sea holes as you will find on the continent.

Etretat sits about two hours south of Le Touquet down the Normandy coast, and the drive in is half of why you come. You leave the dunes of the Côte d'Opale, cut down through Fécamp, and at some point the road turns and you find yourself looking at white chalk cliffs that you have seen a hundred times in Monet paintings without ever quite registering they were a real place. The town itself looks like the houses have been in competition with each other for the last century.

Belle Dune is two golf courses pretending to be one. That is the most interesting thing about it and the most frustrating. Out of nine rounds I played on this trip, none surprised me more.

If I had to drop one course from this trip's itinerary, this would be it. That is not quite a comment on Le Touquet La Foret being a bad course. It is a quieter, flatter, more straightforwardly parkland counterpart to La Mer next door, and it has its moments. The trouble is that almost all of those moments come up against the same problem: La Mer is fifteen minutes' walk away on the same green fee, and once you have played that, the bar is sitting somewhere La Forêt cannot qu

If you stay in Le Touquet for a golf week, this is the course you build the schedule around. Le Touquet La Mer is what put the town on the golfing map a century ago, and after a long restoration it is gradually getting its old reputation back. The current French ranking has it at or near the top of links courses in the country. After playing it once, I can see why.

Of the two courses at Golf d'Hardelot, Les Pins is the one I would come back to first. I know that puts me in a minority. When our group did the end-of-trip rankings, most of the boys had Les Dunes higher, and on visible terms they are not wrong: Les Dunes is genuinely the more spectacular of the two courses, with the bigger views, the bigger elevation changes and most of the camera moments. Les Pins is older, sandier, less obviously dramatic.

Hardelot sits about twenty minutes down the coast from Le Touquet, where the eight of us had set up base for a week of golf across the Côte d'Opale, Normandy and Brittany. The drive south is pleasant enough — pines on either side of the road, the occasional flash of yellow sand where the real dunes show through — and you pull into Golf d'Hardelot already half-decided that you like the look of the place.

The morning we played Waterville started with rain blowing horizontally past the hotel window before sunrise. One of the guys in our group came down to breakfast in flipflops because he had decided, looking at the weather, that golf was off and he might as well be comfortable. There were eight of us. We told him fine, stay at the hotel, we'll pick you up after the round.

The famous Arnold Palmer quote about Tralee, the one every review uses, is that he may have designed the front nine but God designed the back nine. It's a great line and Palmer was good at great lines, but I think it does the front nine a disservice. The back nine at Tralee is genuinely spectacular and deserves the praise it gets. The front nine is also very good and people don't talk about it enough because they've been told for forty years that it's the lesser half.

Most reviews of Old Head start by trying to describe the setting and immediately reaching for the same comparisons. Pebble Beach on steroids. The Cliffs of Moher with golf on top. A video game come to life. I've read all of these phrases multiple times and they all undersell what the place actually is. Old Head is a 220-acre piece of land that sticks two miles out into the Atlantic Ocean, hooked to the south coast of Ireland by a narrow road barely wide enough for two cars to

Morfontaine is one of the most exclusive private clubs in the world. There are 450 members. You don't book a tee time. You don't send an email and ask politely. You don't pay a green fee. You play because someone invites you, and the easiest way for me to get an invitation was to qualify for a tournament that the club hosts.

We had originally booked a tee time on the Old Course. Then the New Course opened in August 2025 with a marketing campaign calling it the best new course in the world for the year. Reviewers fell over themselves to praise it. Golf Digest, top 100 lists, the whole machine. We changed our booking to the New Course well in advance. That's what you do when something is being called the best new course in the world. You want to see it.

Royal Aberdeen sits just north of Aberdeen across the River Don, on a stretch of coast called Balgownie. You drive out of the city centre through some slightly grim industrial outskirts, past a sewage works if I remember right, and then suddenly you're at a proper old Scottish golf club with gorse and dunes and a clubhouse from another century. The transition is jarring in a good way.

Tom Watson said Royal Dornoch was the most fun he ever had on a golf course. Herbert Warren Wind said no golfer has completed his education until he's played it. Andrew Carnegie said if there's a heaven on earth it's here. I played Royal Dornoch toward the end of our Highlands trip and my honest reaction was simpler than any of those. Good course. I enjoyed it. I don't feel qualified to rank it among the great spiritual experiences of my golfing life the way the Americans see

Founded 1887. James Braid did most of the bunkering and greens around 1909. Mackenzie & Ebert did a renovation between 2018 and 2020. Walker Cup hosted here in 1999, won by GB&I against an American team that had Matt Kuchar on it. Curtis Cup in 2012. Amateur Championship has been here twice. Fine. The pedigree is real and you can keep reading about it on their website if you care. What matters is what it's like to play.