# The Best Golf Courses in Arlington, Virginia

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-arlington-va/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Virginia


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

Arlington's golf history starts earlier than almost anywhere in American golf. Washington Golf and Country Club dates to 1894, which makes it Virginia's oldest club in its original place, founded when golf in America was still a rumor from Scotland and the District across the river was a swampy capital with a new hobby.

That is the whole bench, and this ranking will not dress it up: Arlington has two courses, both private, both military-and-government in flavour, in a county with no public 18-hole golf of its own. Army Navy's 27 holes sit by the Pentagon's flight paths, jets on final approach over the fairways. We score the golf first, then the day, then access, and on access both of these fail the visiting golfer completely. The ranking is an argument between two institutions about which institution plays better golf.

## 1Washington Golf and Country Club

Founded in 1894 and still on its ground, Washington Golf and Country Club is Virginia's oldest club in place, and longevity of that order is itself a form of evidence. A club does not hold its members, its neighbourhood, and its standing for 130 years on a mediocre course. The golf has been refined across more than a century of continuous play in the hills above the Potomac, and it carries the compact, walkable, old-American character that modern 7,400-yard golf has largely forgotten.

The concession is size and scale. This is not a championship venue and does not pretend to be one; the modern power game would overrun it, and its charms are the charms of proportion and history rather than examination at the highest level. But this list ranks the golf in Arlington, and the oldest club in Virginia, still thriving on its original site, wins it.

## 2Army Navy Country Club

Army Navy counters with scale: 27 holes in Arlington, a full championship course and a half more, serving the officer class of the Pentagon a few minutes away. The flight paths are not a figure of speech. Aircraft on approach pass over the property, and members treat it the way they treat everything else here, as the sound of the neighbourhood.

As golf, it is the bigger test, and on pure acreage and variety it beats the leader. It finishes second because Washington's continuity and character, a club in place since 1894, is the rarer thing in American golf, and this ranking rewards the golf and the day together. Army Navy gives you more holes. Washington gives you a course that was already old when Army Navy's founders were young.

One more honest note on the pair of them. In a county this dense, this close to the capital, the survival of two full golf properties at all is the story underneath the ranking. Land here has been worth more as almost anything else for half a century. Both clubs held their ground anyway, one since the nineteenth century, and Arlington golfers, the ones with access at least, are the beneficiaries of decisions made before anybody alive was born.

There is no third course, no public option, no value pick, and that absence is the honest headline. Arlington golf is two gates on the same few hills, one from 1894 and one full of colonels, and the rest of the county drives elsewhere to play. The jets keep coming over Army Navy, the members at Washington keep walking ground Grant's generation laid out, and between them they hold 130 years of the game in a county that never built a muni.

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