10 of the most beautiful inland courses you can play

Architecture purists will argue that the most important factor in evaluating the quality of a golf course is the physical arrangement of features and the types of shots and situations they puts us in. But even the most ascetic among them must admit the environments we play through greatly influences our feelings about the course.

Mike Keiser, the developer of destinations like Bandon Dunes in Oregon, Sand Valley in Wisconsin, Cabot Cape Breton in Canada (with partner Ben Cowan-Dewar) and Barnbougle Dunes and Lost Farm in Tasmania (with Richard Sattler), understands the importance of aesthetics. He devotes a chapter of his book The Nature of the Game (2022) to the concept of beauty and has intentionally sought out sites that possess raw emotional power.

Few people, he writes, “make the long journey to the south coast of Oregon—or Tasmania—in order to hit a pure five-iron into a well-defended green. They can find that opportunity anywhere. No, they make the journey so they can hit their five-iron in a setting of incomparable beauty that’s given an exclamation point by the flight of the ball.”

We agree, and Golf Digest’s course ranking panelists are asked to assess each course’s beauty and visceral impact in the Aesthetics category. Not surprisingly the highest scores go to courses that keep heads spinning, like those located on oceans—Pebble Beach, Keiser’s Bandon courses, Manele, Fishers Island—and inland temples like Pine Valley, Sand Hills and Augusta National.

The Aesthetics category, however, is not simply a summation of views and landscaping. We ask panelists to give just as much credence to the visual imprint of the architecture within the holes—green shapes, horizon lines, bunker arrangement and edging, grass texture, hole orientations and the way the composition of the design features create a stimulating frame. These things add as much to the experience of playing golf as do the views, since it's really the architecture we’re looking at when lining up and hitting shots.

Dreamy courses located on cliffs or along endless horizons of water deserve recognition, but beauty comes in all manner of design and setting. The following is a selection of public-access courses that have achieved some of our highest Aesthetics scores despite not being located on a coast.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, but when enough eyes agree on something the subjective approaches the objective.

We urge you to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography, drone footage and reviews from our course panelists. Plus, you can now leave your own ratings on the courses you’ve played … to make your case for a destination we might've missed on this list, or why your favorite should be ranked higher. 

(Editor's Note: An initial list in the September issue of the magazine also included Sea Island Golf Resort's Seaside course and Tobiano in British Columbia, but we modified the headline to include only inland courses.)

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