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

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.

Set beneath the Mourne Mountains along the shores of Dundrum Bay in Northern Ireland, Royal County Down is a links course that feels utterly timeless.