# Moss Creek Golf Club North Course vs. Harbour Town Golf Links: The Hilton Head Island Choice

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/moss-creek-golf-club-north-course-vs-harbour-town-golf-links/

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Course Comparisons / South Carolina


Harbour Town golf course. Photo: danperry.com, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Hilton Head has a famous course and it has a golfer's course, and visitors routinely play the famous one while members across the island quietly prefer the other kind of test. Harbour Town is the lighthouse, the Tour stop, the name on the shirt. Moss Creek's North Course, known locally as Devil's Elbow, is the private shot maker's layout that Lowcountry golfers talk about the way mechanics talk about an engine only they get to open. Comparing them is really comparing two philosophies of golf in the same swampy, oak draped terrain: precision as spectacle versus precision as a private habit.

## Harbour Town Golf Links

Pete Dye designed Harbour Town with Jack Nicklaus consulting, and it opened in 1969, immediately wrong by the standards of its moment. Golf course design in 1969 meant big greens, big bunkers, room everywhere. Dye built small greens and railroad tie bunkering and a course that, at about 7,100 yards, is short and tight by modern Tour standards. The PGA Tour has come back every year since 1969 for the RBC Heritage, played the week after the Masters, which means the course has been examined by the best fields in golf for more than five decades and has never been exposed as a pushover. That is the strongest evidence any course can present.

The 18th, finishing at the red and white Harbour Town Lighthouse, is the signature image of Lowcountry golf. But the course's real argument is the other seventeen holes: target golf before the term existed, where the premium sits on positioning and approach angles rather than power. Resort access means anyone can test the theory, at a price, with non guest fees in the $300 to $450 premium range. Expensive, yes. Also a genuine Tour venue you can book, which is a short list.

## Moss Creek Golf Club North Course

Moss Creek is a private 36 hole club, and the North Course is the second of its two championship courses, designed by Tom Fazio and opened in 1978. Par 72, 6,510 yards from the championship tees, with a 72.3 rating and 134 slope per GolfPass. Read those numbers together. At barely 6,500 yards it still rates 72.3 and slopes 134, which is the scorecard's way of saying the difficulty lives in the shots, not the distance. GolfPass describes it as a shot maker's course, short and tight, with elevated greens surrounded by water or signature trees. Locals call it Devil's Elbow, and courses do not earn names like that by being generous.

John Fought updated the North Course in a renovation running from March to August 2025, so the current version is freshly tuned rather than coasting on a 1978 reputation. The comparison to Harbour Town almost writes itself: same island, same tight corridors through Lowcountry oaks, same premium on the approach shot, one of them on television every April and the other known mostly to the members who play it every week.

## The verdict

Harbour Town wins this, and the deciding factor is proof under examination. Fifty plus years of Tour fields, a design that changed American architecture, and a finishing hole known worldwide give it a ceiling Moss Creek cannot match. In [our Hilton Head Island ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-hilton-head-island-sc/) and [the South Carolina state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/), Harbour Town is the island's standard.

Concede Moss Creek North its honest edge, though: as a weekly playing experience for a good golfer, it may be the purer test. No resort traffic, no $300 plus green fee logic, just a tight, freshly renovated Fazio that rates harder than its yardage and rewards exactly the shots Harbour Town rewards, without the gallery ropes. If you live on the island, the North Course is the better golf life. If you are visiting once, play the lighthouse course, pay the premium, and know that across the island the members are smiling about the one you cannot book.

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