Golf de Granville: Scotland in Normandy
- Gunnar Kobin
- May 18
- 4 min read
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 highlands. It is a course that does not lean on resemblance. It just resembles.
A bit of history. Granville opened in 1912 as a small layout put together by local enthusiasts, but the course you actually play today is mostly the work of Harry Colt, who came in and totally redesigned the place in 1921. Colt is the same architect who laid out Le Touquet La Mer a couple of hundred kilometres up the same coast, and the same hand is unmistakable in the design here. The bunkering sits where the trouble would have been even without it. The routing follows the existing dunes rather than carving them up. There is the constant impression that the architect respected what was already on the ground and added only as much as he had to. Colt worked here with his long-time partner C. H. Alison. The course celebrated its centenary in 2012. The main 18-hole loop is officially called Le Links, which is a name that earns itself.
The first thing you notice about playing here is how firm the ground is. Hard fairways. Hard approaches. The kind of surfaces where a well-struck iron does as much running as it does flying. It is the same character you get at Le Touquet La Mer, only more so. The fairways at Granville are not what you would call wide. Even on a still day there is enough breeze around to make club selection a guessing game. On several holes we ended up taking a club less than we had thought, because the ground was clearly going to handle the last twenty metres for us.
The greens are where the course really earns its links-comparison. They needed imagination. Some are saucer-shaped, with a low point in the middle that quietly gathers the ball toward a single pin position. Others are the opposite, raised in the centre, where a tee shot landing on the middle bounces toward an edge. A few have both kinds of contours running through them. A few are completely flat and seem to be daring you to make a mistake on them. None of it is unfair. All of it asks you to look at the green before you choose the shot, rather than after.
A word about the rakes. Granville has the most unusual bunker system I have come across. Instead of a rake lying flat on the ground beside the bunker, or hanging on a small rack, the rake at Granville is housed inside a small concrete hole built into the ground next to each trap. You pull the rake up out of the hole, you rake the sand, and you push the rake back down into the hole again. The first time you see one of these things you assume it is an old drainage installation. The second time you see one you realise the rake is meant to go in it. It is the kind of small, particular, idiosyncratic detail that a course laid out by an English architect a hundred years ago accumulates over time and then keeps.
The round we played was, honestly, the day my game decided to take a half-day off. I shot 85, which on a links of this kind in a reasonable wind is not the disaster it might sound, but it was not the round I had had at Etretat two days before either. I won't go through the details. There were three holes where the ground was harder than I read it to be, and four others where I missed the green in places that turned a routine par-save into a creative project. The point is that Granville does not give you anything if you are off your game, and does not punish you in any particularly malicious way either. It just sits there as it is, and you score what you score.
But here is the thing that puts Granville on the list. After three rounds in a row where the kitchen had closed at fourteen hundred and we had had to make do with sandwiches or with planning lunch around the turn, the restaurant at Granville was open after our round. Properly open. Tables set, menus out, a waiter who was genuinely interested in what we wanted to order. We sat down, ate hot food, drank cold beer looking out at a Harry Colt links from a hundred years ago, and felt the trip get a little of its sense of luck back. It is a small thing. It is also exactly the kind of small thing that determines whether you remember a round fondly or not.
Final word. Granville is worth the drive from Dinard or Saint-Malo. It is the one course on this trip where the playing surfaces and the design actually deliver on the constantly-repeated French marketing promise of "links-style", because it really is one. It is not always pretty in the conventional way. On a windy day in the wrong mood it would not be much fun. But on the day we played it, with the breeze cooperating, the rake holes mildly amusing us, and the clubhouse waiting at the end, it was one of the better golf days I have had outside the British Isles. If you are doing a Brittany or Lower Normandy trip, you should make the time.
Read also my other blogs from the same region
