Les Pins golf course at the seaside resort of Hardelot might just be the best golf course in Europe.
I appreciate that may seem like a slightly ridiculous statement to make about a resort track. It never occurred to me once before I arrived that it would be a thought I might be having.
When I visited as part of our 48 hours in France trip I knew relatively little about Les Pins, beyond it being one of the two courses at Hardelot.
I was only really familiar with it because it’s a short drive from Le Touquet.
But after 18 holes, I found myself wondering why, as a golf community, we don’t talk about it more often. And the more I thought about it on the journey home, the more convinced I became that Les Pins deserves to be part of some interesting conversations.
The first thing you should know about Les Pins is that it’s a Tom Simpson design. If you know your golf architects then you’ll be aware of Simpson and his extraordinary body of work.
His portfolio includes Fontainebleau, Ballybunion and Cruden Bay. That alone should tell you that this is not some anonymous French golf course that happens to be nice to look at.
But what struck me about Les Pins is how much of its set-up made sense. It has almost everything I value in a golf course. There are even some similarities to the great heathland courses I enjoy playing back home in England. It has strong echoes of Swinley Forest and The Berkshire about the place.
There are plenty of trees, as you would imagine for a place with a name that translates to The Pines, but they don’t operate as the main hazard. Rather, the fairways sit between areas of heather and scrub, creating these wonderful open corridors through the forest.
It reminded me, in places, of Pinehurst with how wide the corridors of tree were. It’s a course design that I love and have a lot of time for.
So what makes Les Pins so good?
The first is a brilliant opening hole. You’re hit with a par-5 straight out of the gate and it immediately gives you a taster of what’s to come. It sweeps around a huge dogleg left-to-right and is very much a fader’s golf hole.
One of the holes on the back-9 has a stand of trees sitting in the middle of the fairway, giving you the option of taking one side or the other before approaching what is another superbly constructed green.
Les Pins doesn’t have a signature per se, but it does have a couple of spectacular par 3s. The 7th and 13th are visually stunning. They are an incredible pair of golf holes and, from the first of those par-3s, there is a brilliant mini stretch of holes to finish off the front 9.
The 8th is a drivable par-4 that creates a genuine risk-and-reward decision thanks to the location of the central bunker. Carry it and you can potentially run the ball towards the green, or take the safer route and bail out. It’s a really cute hole.
The 9th challenges you with a rather extreme right-to-left dogleg. Bigger hitters are encouraged to stay over to the left off the tee for a more inviting approach shot.
What struck me, and this goes for the rest of the course too, is how well the place flows. There are stretches where several holes run through the same broad corridor, creating these wonderful golfing vistas of tee, fairway and green that feel as though they’re disappearing into the trees.
It’s something I particularly love about Swinley Forest, and there are moments at Les Pins that produce the same feeling.
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