Views from Etretat
- Gunnar Kobin
- May 18
- 6 min read
Etretat sits about two hours south of Le Touquet down the Normandy coast, and the drive in is half of why you come. You leave the dunes of the Côte d'Opale, cut down through Fécamp, and at some point the road turns and you find yourself looking at white chalk cliffs that you have seen a hundred times in Monet paintings without ever quite registering they were a real place. The town itself looks like the houses have been in competition with each other for the last century. Every front gate has a turret. The bakery looks like a chateau. By the time you find the golf course, you have given up trying to keep your jaw closed.
The course is on top of those cliffs. Eighty metres above the bay, eighteen holes laid along the top of the chalk, with the famous arch visible from several of the tees. It opened in 1908 as an 11-hole layout designed by Arnaud Massy and Julien Chantepie. Massy is worth a moment of your attention. He won the British Open in 1907, the only Frenchman to take that trophy for more than a hundred years, and he finished his playing career as the resident pro right here, on this clifftop. There is a small quietness to that I kept thinking about on the way around.
The course has been changed a lot since 1908. The biggest reconstruction was in 1990, but smaller modifications happen all the time, mostly because the cliffs themselves keep moving. They lose about fifty centimetres a year to the sea, and over the decades a few of Massy's original holes have effectively slid into the Channel and had to be rebuilt further inland. The course you play today is recognisably the same idea as the one he left, just with the front edge slowly being shaved off.
A note on the weather. The morning we played at Etretat we got to test the local saying that you can have four seasons in a single round. The first hole was played in horizontal rain that the wind off the Channel turned into the kind of conditions where you stop trying to keep your glove dry and just hit it. By the second tee the rain had moved on and the sky started to clear. The wind hadn't. We had a steady breeze for the rest of the round that meant on several holes we were taking two clubs more than the GPS was telling us to. None of which was really a complaint. It is part of the experience of the place.
The opening holes are inland, cut through woods, with mature trees framing the corridors and very little wind getting through at first. The first is a 370-metre par four (the Golfshot app will tell you it is a par five, but the signage at the tee says four, and four is correct). I made three on it, which in sideways rain felt better than three. The kind of start that fools you for ninety seconds into thinking you are going to keep playing like that. You do not. The next eight holes are gentle. Tree-protected greens, generous fairways, almost no elevation change. From the yellow tees the front nine measures only 2,601 metres, which is short by anyone's reckoning. On a still day a single-figure handicap is meant to be scoring through this stretch.
You get to the ninth tee and the course changes completely. The ninth is a 132-metre par three that drops down toward the cliff line, the bay opening up behind the flag. The tenth is the hole everyone has come for: a par five of 373 metres that climbs steeply uphill from a tee box almost at the cliff edge, with a fairway that gets narrower as it rises and a green hidden over the brow. The fairway runs along the coastal path. The coastal path is the route every tourist in town takes to walk up to the cliffs proper. By the time I stepped up to the tenth, the rain had cleared and the path was busy. Ten or fifteen people stood at the rope just past the tee, watching. You remind yourself it is a Thursday morning in May and none of them will remember whether you find the fairway. They watch anyway. I made six. Most kept walking.
The eleventh is a 152-metre par three downhill that closes the cliff sequence. After that the course pulls back inland and the rest of the round is, broadly, parkland that happens to have sea air on it. There are good holes back here. The fourteenth, a 274-metre par four with a green tucked behind a small rise, gave me my second birdie of the day. But the show has already played by the time you walk off the eleventh green, and the back nine more or less acknowledges it. The eighteenth, a 468-metre par five back to the clubhouse, plays gently downhill and gives you one last birdie chance if your legs and your patience are still in working order.
A word on difficulty. On paper Etretat is not a hard golf course. From the yellows on a still day it is short and gettable. The course-handicap-3 rating tells you most of what you need to know. What the course actually has, in its defence, is the wind. The prevailing westerly often blows at 25 to 30 knots. There is a spring north-easterly with its own local name, the nordet, that comes in off the Channel and turns the place into a different round entirely. Even the moderately breezy day we got made the yardage on the card feel optimistic. I still managed 77, my best score of the trip so far. Most of our group played their best round of the week. Etretat on a calm day is somewhere between a holiday round and a confidence-restoring exercise. Etretat in proper wind I imagine is somewhere else entirely.
Now for the part that genuinely puzzled me. Golf d'Etretat has a clubhouse restaurant with one of the best views you will find at any golf course in France. Floor-to-ceiling glass, terrace, full panorama over the cliffs and the bay. And the hot kitchen closes at two in the afternoon. We came off the eighteenth at a quarter past two, after a round that had started in sideways rain and taken the time these things take, and were politely told the kitchen was now done for the day and would we like a sandwich. We did not want a sandwich. We wanted hot food and a glass of wine and the view we had just paid the green fee to look at.
The thing that turns this from petty into genuinely strange is the maths. Four-balls come into the clubhouse every fifteen minutes through the early afternoon. Tourists wander past the terrace all day on their way to and from the cliffs. There is a steady, dependable, slightly captive market sitting in front of the kitchen, with money to spend and a view to spend it in front of. And the kitchen says no. Whoever is making the catering call at Etretat is making a business decision I cannot follow.
None of which is the course's fault, and none of which really matters once you are back on the tenth tee with the chalk behind your shoulder. You go to Etretat for the cliffs, for the famous tenth, and for the small strange thrill of playing golf on top of one of the most painted bits of coastline in the world. The conditioning is fine without being remarkable. The architecture for most of the round is unspectacular. None of that really ends up mattering.
If you are putting together a Normandy stretch on a golf trip, this is one you just play. Combine the round with a walk along the chemin des douaniers afterwards, find a restaurant in town that hasn't shut its kitchen yet, and you will be glad you came.
Read also my other blogs from the same region
