Course Comparisons / South Carolina

Moss Creek Golf Club North Course vs. Palmetto Hall Golf Club Arthur Hills Course: The Hilton Head Island Choice

Hilton Head Island gives a golfer this choice in two forms. There is the private version, a Tom Fazio course inside a gated Lowcountry club where you play as a member or a guest, and there is the bookable version, an Arthur Hills course at a semi-private club where a public tee time is actually available. Moss Creek North and the Palmetto Hall Hills Course sit close enough to share a weather forecast and a county. They do not share an answer to the only question that matters first: can you get on?

Moss Creek North: the shotmaker's private test

Moss Creek is a private 36 hole club, and its North Course, designed by Tom Fazio and opened in 1978 as the second championship course at the club, is known locally as Devil's Elbow North. Par 72, 6,510 yards, rating 72.3, slope 134 from the championship tees. The listings call it a shotmaker's course, short and tight, with elevated greens surrounded by water or signature trees, and that description has survived because it is accurate in the ways that affect a score. You do not overpower this course. You place the ball, you flight the approach below or around the trouble, and you putt on elevated greens that reject the lazy shot more politely and more completely than a longer course would.

John Fought updated the North Course in a renovation running from March to August 2025, a recent and serious investment in a 1978 Fazio, which tells you the club intends the North to remain a real test rather than the friendly second option.

Palmetto Hall Hills: the bookable Hills

The Arthur Hills Course at Palmetto Hall opened in 1991, was named to Golf Digest's list of America's Top 10 New Courses that year, and plays par 72 at 6,918 yards from the back tees, more than 400 yards longer than Moss Creek North. It was built on the site of an old Civil War garrison, a piece of ground history the Lowcountry carries under a lot of its golf, and Heritage Golf Group, which bought Palmetto Hall in 2022, debuted renovated greens and new Better Billy bunkers on the Hills Course in October 2024. So both courses arrive at this comparison freshly worked on, which removes conditioning as an excuse either way.

Hills asks a bigger, more conventional championship question than Fazio asks at Moss Creek. More length, more room to make a mistake with the driver and pay for it later rather than immediately, and a semi-private model, one of two courses at Palmetto Hall, where public tee times are available. For a visiting golfer reading the best golf courses in Hilton Head Island, this is usually where the comparison ends, because a course you can book beats a course you can only admire, every time, on a trip you have already paid to take.

The verdict

On the golf alone, Moss Creek North wins, narrowly. The tight, elevated, water guarded test at 6,510 yards makes a player hit more distinct shots in a round than the Hills Course asks at 6,918, and a Fazio from 1978 that a club is still renovating in 2025 has earned its standing in the 5 best golf courses in South Carolina conversation. The concession belongs to Palmetto Hall, and it is not small. The Hills Course is longer, recently renovated, nationally recognized from its opening year, and, decisive for almost every reader, actually playable without an invitation. A top 10 new course pedigree from Golf Digest is not a consolation prize.

So the split is clean. Members and invited guests who value precision over power should take Moss Creek North and enjoy a course built to reward exactly that. Everyone else, which is to say nearly every golfer planning a Hilton Head trip, should book the Hills Course at Palmetto Hall without a flicker of regret, and save the Moss Creek admiration for the drive past the gate.

One island, two honest answers. The better course is private. The better choice, for most golfers, is the one with a tee time with their name on it.