So far in this series of articles about resort golf in Europe we’ve concentrated on Portugal and Spain but now it’s time to look further afield and check out what’s on offer to the north of the Iberian peninsula in the much under-rated golfing nation of France. With the six resorts profiled below, Deauville has 27 holes in play and the other five each boast two 18-hole layouts at the same location.

The message of great, strategic golf course architecture is clear. The actual words used to describe those golf courses, however, are many. The Glossary column will examine more precise terms and concepts that one will find when exploring golf course architecture.

The purpose of the Review of The Month feature is twofold. Top100GolfCourses has always aimed to salute and encourage those who are putting admirable effort into reviewing the world’s great golf courses. We’ll be chatting with the month’s star authors and discussing topics such as golf in their area, what they like to see in a strong course review, and of course dig a little deeper into their own winning review.

We began a series of resort golf features a few months back with a look at The Argarve, which many consider to still be the top region for resort golf in all of continental Europe. We then followed that write-up with three similar articles on the Spanish Costas, the Canary Islands and Mallorca in the Balearics. It’s now time to return to Portugal to highlight some of the great golf on offer around Lisbon.

It’s not often we get a chance to closely inspect a course that’s closed during serious renovation work – indeed the last time was probably with architect Martin Ebert when the Ailsa at Turnberry underwent a total makeover in 2015 – so we were pleased to be invited a few weeks ago to have a look at a nearly completed major refurbishment project overseen by American architect Kurtis Bowman at La Hacienda Links Golf Resort in San Roque.

In the last few weeks we’ve published ranking charts for Northern Ireland, Wales, England, Ireland and Scotland so it’s now time to extract the best 100 of those 380 courses and present them in a re-ordered fashion within our Britain & Ireland Top 100 listings. In this revision, 32 layouts move up, 50 drop down, 13 stay in the same place and 5 are new entries or re-entries.