# Secession Golf Club: A Course Profile

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/secession-golf-club-profile/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Course Profiles / South Carolina


A golf ball beside the hole on a green. Photo: PattayaPatrol, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

No carts. No cart paths. Fourteen holes along tidal marsh. If you want to understand Secession Golf Club, start with what it refuses to have. On Gibbes Island outside Beaufort, the club built an all walking, links style course in the South Carolina Lowcountry, a place where the default American answer is a riding cart, a beverage cart, and fairways framed by houses. Secession went the other way, toward Scotland, and it went there in 1992, before walking only was a fashionable position to take.

The designer was Bruce Devlin, the Australian who played the PGA Tour and then built courses. The course opened in the fall of 1992 and plays par 72 at 7,068 yards, with a 74.2 course rating and a 143 slope. Those numbers describe a hard walk in both senses. Seven thousand yards on foot, with marsh in play on fourteen holes, is a round that asks about your legs and your nerve in the same sentence. The tidal element is the real architecture. Marsh that changes with the tide changes the course with it. A carry that looks generous at one hour looks greedy at another, and the ground game that links golf rewards becomes a genuine option rather than a style choice.

## Sod walls in South Carolina

The detail golfers repeat is the stacked sod bunkering, built as an homage to Scottish links golf. Stacked sod is not decoration. A sod wall face punishes in a particular way. The ball that finds one often sits close under a near vertical face, and the shot out is a chop, not a splash. On a Lowcountry course, where the palette is marsh grass, palmettos, and flat light, those dark stacked faces also do visual work. They give the eye something hard to aim against in a landscape that otherwise runs soft at the edges.

Devlin's routing makes the marsh the hazard and the view at once, which is the oldest trick in coastal golf and still the best one. Fourteen holes is most of a round. There is no inland breather stretch where the water leaves you alone. Our [Beaufort ranking](/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-beaufort-sc/) puts Secession at the top of its town for exactly this commitment. Plenty of courses borrow links vocabulary. Fewer restructure the entire day around walking to earn it.

There is also the question of what walking does to strategy, and Secession is a useful place to think about it. A golfer in a cart plays golf as a series of arrivals. A golfer on foot plays it as a continuous argument with the ground, feeling the firmness underfoot, watching the marsh water sit in relation to the green he is walking toward, arriving at the ball with the shot already half decided. Links golf was built for that rhythm, and the rating numbers suggest Devlin protected it. A 143 slope on a walking course is a deliberate choice. The club could have softened the test to flatter tired legs late in the round. It kept the test and let the legs fend for themselves, which is why a round here lingers in the memory differently than a cart round of identical quality. You do not just recall the holes. You recall earning them, one marsh crossing at a time.

## The concession, and who this is for

Here is the honest limit. Secession is private, members and guests only, so for most golfers this profile is a description of a course they will never play unless an invitation arrives. The walking only policy, admirable as it is, also shuts out golfers who cannot walk 18. A club can be right about its principles and still be a closed door, and Secession is both.

Within [the South Carolina state ranking](/blog/the-5-best-golf-courses-in-south-carolina/), it holds its place on purity of concept. No paths cutting the sightlines. No houses. Marsh, sod, wind, and a 143 slope that does not care how scenic you find it. The Lowcountry has softer golf everywhere you look. Secession is the round you walk off tired, with wet light coming across the marsh and your legs reminding you that this is how the game was played for its first four hundred years.

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