History of the Golf du Cotentin

An unexpected encounter:

The Fontenay golf course was born in 1971 from the unlikely meeting between two men.
One of them, Michel Gatellier, who owned the Chateau de Courcy, in the city of Fontenay district, didn’t know what to do with a 30 hectares private hunting ground that he owned by the coast, and was ill-fitted for dairy farming.
The other, Claude Blanguernon, retired teacher and President of Saint Vaast La Hougue Tennis Club, just returned from a long stay in Scotland, where he had discovered and fell in love with the Game of Golf.

They probably met during a tennis competition. While talking, Claude mentioned his discovering Golf, the great similarity between Scottish and Cotentin’s landscapes; Michel told him about his private hunting ground…

Fontenay Golf Course is born...

A meeting was decided on the spot with a few friends, and, within an hour, the plan took shape. They limited themselves on 9 holes, carried out earthworks with local contractors, without an architect. The entire project was financed by a bank loan, guaranteed by the first twelve members. Two wooden sheds would make a Club House!
Ten more years later the club had 110 members who felt a bit cramped in the two sheds. The decision was made to build a permanent structure for the Club House.
A new call to the members was made to finance the operation.

Ten more years later, Michel, who had been the club’s president for more than twenty years, wished to move on. After many ups and downs, he suggested to sell the land to the members.
For the third time, some of them got involved again and financed this purchase.
And the golf course lived on.

Extension to 18 holes !

A luck would have it that a neighboring farmer came to retire and sold 35 hectares of his property, in a good location to allow an extension to18 holes of the course.
The plan was launched.
Sadly, financing the project was difficult, administrative authorizations even harder to obtain, and this first attempt failed in 1997.

Ten years later (again!) a new and young management team took over; the project would finally start in the summer of 2008.

When the 18-hole course opens in the summer of 2009, the Fontenay Golf course will have become the Presqu’île du Cotentin Golf Course.

Yves BUREAU, famous architect who has an excellent reputation for his designs and landscapes, designed this Par 72 course, of a 5808 meters length (6352 Yards), which offers the best challenge for golfers of any level.