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.

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.