I suppose the kindest way to describe Granville when I played it last week was “a little rough around the edges” but I write that in the most sympathetic way possible – the green complexes were absolutely fine as they, thankfully, have irrigation, but the fairways were bare and rather barren, which is no bad thing for a fast-running links but the contrast between watered and parched turf was rather stark, to say the least. From what I hear, discussions on remedying this situation are ongoing.

Of course, conditioning is always such a transient aspect of course appraisal and I can always see past immediate issues – the big problem here is that it looks like this situation has gone on for a while now and it really has to be addressed now in all seriousness. Stéphane Rouen from GK Consult is currently looking after agronomy at the club and he’s doing a great job around the greens but I imagine he’d like all of the course to be in prime condition.

Granville’s a cracking Colt track from around the time of the First World War and although changes have been made to the layout, mainly to accommodate a road leading to a nearby airfield (locally known as “the Road to the Sea”) which was built in 1947, there are still a large number of holes in play (1-3, 8-10, 15, 17 and 18) that are much as originally laid out.

As Stéphane also told me, “the first half of the 4th hole and the second half of the 5th hole are all Colt, along with the 7th, 11th (previously 12th) and 16th greens, while greens 4, 6, 12 and 13 are 1990s creations and the 14th is a 2012 production.”

My personal favourite was the semi-blind par three 2nd, which has one of the best green complexes I have ever seen on any golf course. The bowled green on the par four 7th was another brilliant putting surface, as was the 3-tiered green on the following hole.

While I loved the front nine, the back nine didn’t quite match up to what had gone before, largely because of changes made in recent times to avoid fairways crossing the Route de la Mer on three separate occasions. I did however love the two volcano greens at holes 10 and 16, both of which are totally outrageous and would probably never be built nowadays.

I’m grateful to club president Daniel Paille for kindly giving me a copy of the club’s centenary publication, where pages 27 and 28 (with a map of the course from 1922) fold out to be directly compared against pages 29 and 30, which have a corresponding map of how the course looked in 2012.

This proved to be invaluable when used in conjunction with other correspondence to piece together the provenance of the layout today. Granville has certainly been touched up in the last few years but it remains firmly entrenched in a more innocent era when links play was simple and uncomplicated and it should really be on every serious golfer’s hit list.

Jim McCann