Dinard Golf: 1887 on the Emerald Coast
- Gunnar Kobin
- May 18
- 4 min read
We had been based in Dinard for the second half of the trip, and the final round of the week was a fifteen-minute drive west to Saint-Briac-sur-Mer and Dinard Golf, the second oldest golf course in France.
A bit of background. 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 in India and Egypt, settled on the Emerald Coast, and decided to bring their golf with them. They created France's first tennis club at around the same time, then went looking for fifty hectares of dunes and heath to put eighteen holes on. They found it just outside Saint-Briac. Tom Dunn was engaged. The course opened in 1887. The Saturday Review described it three years later as "the best course in France today". Some of that confidence is still alive a hundred and forty years later.
The course was mined during the Second World War and didn't reopen until 1949. It has hosted internationals and championships in the decades since. The original wooden clubhouse was replaced in 1927 by an Art Deco building designed by Marcel Oudin, a French architect and an early adopter of concrete construction. The clubhouse was officially classified as a French historic monument in 2015. It is worth ten minutes of your time when you walk in. The trophy cases are full of cups won at events you have heard of. The bay window has a view straight up the eighteenth fairway. Equally worth saying, the building shows its age. The woodwork could use a sand. The carpets could use a year off. It is the kind of place that has earned the right to look slightly tired.
The course itself is in reasonable shape, though the fairways could have used some more grass in places. Sandy soil, firm playing surfaces, the kind of ground that makes ball flights run on in the way you remember from links golf. From the yellow tees the course measures only 4,611 metres at par 68, which sounds like a pitch-and-putt and is not. There is wind out here almost every day. The greens are small, raised and quick. The course defends itself with the contours rather than with the yardage.
The first five holes play through trees, inland, with the sea only occasionally suggested between branches. They are gentle holes. Two short par fours, a longer one, a par five, then one more par four before you walk to the sixth tee. The sixth is where the round changes completely. It is the famous hole here, a par four of 274 metres that is ranked among Europe's 100 most beautiful holes, and it is where the course arrives on the shore properly. From there, the rest of the round is more or less an open seaside walk with views the rest of the trip had not quite managed. Bay of Saint-Briac to the right. Île des Ebihens in the middle distance. Beach holes that run along sandy edges. A routing that bends back and forth between the high ground and the lower coastal land. From the sixth onward there is barely a hole where the sea is not part of the picture.
The greens are where the course really gets you. They are not difficult in the obvious way. They are not particularly fast, and they are not enormous. What they are is deceiving. There are breaks on these greens that you cannot see until you have hit the putt and watched the ball go somewhere you had not aimed it. There are hidden breaks on at least half of the greens at Dinard. It is the kind of subtlety you would expect from an architect who had spent his life in Scotland working out where to put greens on links land.
This was the last round of the trip, and it was the best round of golf I had played in a long time. The only real hiccup came on the sixth, the famous one, where my swing went somewhere private for about ten minutes and a six went on the card. Everything else came together. I did not three-putt once. The putts that needed to drop, dropped. I shot 32 on the back nine, with birdies on the seventeenth and the eighteenth, and finished on 69. There are mornings of golf you remember for years. This was one of them.
A note on the clubhouse food, which we did not eat. The Dinard restaurant is, by reputation, open after the round and good. We did not get to find out. A flight from Paris was waiting for us in the early evening, with a three-and-a-half-hour drive in between, and the drive turned into six hours of motorway traffic that took us closer to missing the flight than I would like to admit. By the time we got through the gate at the airport we were not thinking about hot food at Dinard. We were thinking about whatever sandwich Charles de Gaulle was willing to sell us for twenty euros. The hot food at Dinard, for me, remains a matter of trust in second-hand reports.
Final word. Dinard is, of all the courses we played in the Côte d'Opale, Normandy and Brittany, the one with the strongest sense of place. It is not the best course of the trip. La Mer at Le Touquet is the best course of the trip and probably one of the best in France. But Dinard is the one I would build a return visit around. The clubhouse, the history, the easy walking on real links land, and the small permanent fact that you are playing on the same fifty hectares of dune that retired colonial army officers walked over in 1887 and decided would make a golf course. None of that wears off. If you are doing a Brittany trip and you have a free morning, this is where you spend it.
Read also my other blogs from the same region
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