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Jameson Links The first time I played this course, in 2022, I hated it. I want to be honest about why, because the reason turned out to have very little to do with the golf course. We played Portmarnock that morning. One of the great championship links in the world, immediately next door, and we walked off it and came straight here for the afternoon round. Nothing was ever going to survive that comparison. I stood on the first tee of Jameson Links with Portmarnock still in my

You are on top of a hill and there is nothing between you and the weather. No shelter, no framing, no corridor of trees or dunes to hit down. The ground falls away in every direction, the wind has nothing to break it, and every shot is played against a horizon rather than into a gap. It reminded me immediately of the Costa Navarino courses, and specifically of that — the exposure of being up high with the world laid out underneath you. Very few Irish courses feel like it.

Enniscrone is overrated. I thought so the first time I played it, in 2022, and I did not entirely trust myself, an unfamiliar course and a middling round can turn anybody into a critic. So when we built this September's trip I put it back on the schedule specifically to find out whether I had been unfair.

There is a mountain standing over this golf course called Knocknarea, and the lump on top of it is a neolithic cairn that is traditionally held to be the grave of Queen Maeve. Nobody has ever excavated it. It has sat up there for something like five thousand years, and you spend your round underneath it.

I have played golf in wind before. I had never played a course where somebody had gone out before us and strapped the flags to the pins so they would not blow away. That decided the day. The greens played slow — not badly kept, but nothing was going to run true into that. We were aiming thirty metres off line on approach shots and hoping. Putts that should have been quick were being knocked at. By the fourth hole nobody in the group was talking about their score any more

In 1993, a month into the construction of the Glashedy Links next door, a helicopter landed at Ballyliffin. Nick Faldo got out, played the Old Links, and called it the most natural links he had ever seen. He liked it enough that he stayed the night to finish all eighteen holes. Three years later, after Glashedy opened, he made an offer to buy the club outright. The members voted it down.

The club was founded at a meeting in Ballyliffin Hall in April 1947, and for years the members cut the course themselves, bringing their own lawnmowers, mowing, then playing. They still call it the Spirit of Ballyliffin, and they are refreshingly unembarrassed about having got where they are with no money at all.

Ardglass is a dramatic cliff top course in the shadow of Royal County Down

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.