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Kungsbanan in Aland Golf Club is totallt different from the sister course in the same club

Slottsbanan in Aland is one very unlikely destination but it is really worth it

This one is from a different trip. Not a golf trip at all, as it happens. I was in New Zealand with my family over the New Year, and we had stopped for New Year's Eve in a town on the North Island called Napier. Napier deserves a paragraph of its own. The town was largely destroyed in 1931, when a large earthquake hit Hawke's Bay and the fires that broke out afterwards finished off most of what the quake had left standing. What makes Napier remarkable is what happened next

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.

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.

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