# General Burnside Island Golf Course: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/general-burnside-island-golf-course-profile/

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Course Profiles / Kentucky


A golfer walking a fairway. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

The course sits on an island. That is not a figure of speech or a marketing stretch. General Burnside Island Golf Course, in General Burnside Island State Park in Burnside, Kentucky, is surrounded by Lake Cumberland, and the water is not a hazard that visits a few holes. It is the ground condition of the entire round. You cross onto an island, play 18 holes designed by Brian Ault and opened in 2008, and the lake waits at the edges the whole way around.

State park golf lives or dies on honesty. Nobody drives to a state park course expecting a private club clubhouse or a tour stop. They expect scenery, a fair price, and a course in decent shape that gives them a day outside. Burnside overdelivers on the first item by geography alone, and it has the hardware to prove the rest: it won first place for golf courses in the Kentucky Living Magazine 2016 awards. Statewide reader awards are not architecture prizes, but they tell you something architecture prizes do not. People who play Kentucky golf kept voting for the island.

## The hole everyone talks about

The signature hole is the par 3 14th, about 172 yards, played straight downhill to a tear shaped green. Downhill par 3s are a gift to golfers because the shot feels bigger than the number, and this one has the full package: elevation, a green with a distinctive shape to aim at, and the lake country spread out around it. A 172 yard shot that plays shorter, with a target you can picture before you pull the club, is the hole a state park course needs. It is the one you describe at dinner.

The rest of the card is modest and playable. Par 71, 6,394 yards from the longest tees. That is a course built for the golfers who actually use a state park: families, lake weekend groups, local players who want a real round without a real beating. Ault understood the assignment. His design family runs through the Kentucky state parks system, including the courses at Dale Hollow Lake and Grayson Lake, Hidden Cove, and that repetition matters. Kentucky has a quiet tradition of park golf designed by people who know park golfers, and Burnside is the most scenic expression of it because no other park in the system can put its course on an island in Lake Cumberland.

## Where it fits in Kentucky golf

Our [Burnside town page](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-burnside-ky/) starts and nearly ends with this course, which is the point. Burnside is a lake town, and the island course is its golf identity entire. Set against the [Kentucky state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-kentucky/), dominated by private clubs around Louisville and Lexington, Burnside makes a different argument: that a public course in a state park, on an island, at everyday prices, can be the most memorable round in the state for a certain kind of golfer, the kind who counts the drive over the water and the downhill 14th among the shots of their summer.

The concession, plainly: this is not a championship test, and at 6,394 yards it will not stretch a strong player. Conditioning at park courses rises and falls with budgets and seasons in a way private club conditioning does not. Go in expecting those terms and the course beats them.

Go for the island. Stay for a layout that knows exactly who it serves, a par 3 you will remember in February, and a round where the water is not in play on 11 holes or 14 holes but around everything, all day, like a moat the golf gets to live inside.

**Reader responses are open.** Please cite a specific hole, a price, or a round you have played.