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.