# The Best Golf Courses in Charlottesville

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

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Virginia


A golf course in autumn foliage. Photo: Famartin, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Charlottesville golf happens in horse country, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge, where the farms are too pretty to be real and two of the best-known names in American course design have left work within a few miles of each other. Pete Dye built Full Cry at Keswick Hall. Davis Love III built Birdwood for the University of Virginia at Boar's Head.

Three courses make this ranking, and they map the town's social geography precisely: a resort course by a famous architect, a university course the public can play, and the old private club that Charlottesville society has used for a century. We score the golf first, then the day, then access. The Dye course wins on golf. The university course might win your trip.

## 1Keswick Hall Full Cry Course

Full Cry is Pete Dye at Keswick Hall, in horse country east of town, and Dye in Virginia's piedmont is Dye with the volume set by the land rather than by his own mischief: rolling farms, hard angles, the familiar Dye talent for making a comfortable lie feel like a negotiation. A resort guest can book it, which in this ranking of private clubs is a genuine competitive advantage, but it wins on the golf first. It is the most demanding, most architecturally serious course in the Charlottesville area.

The concession: Dye's mannerisms divide golfers, and Full Cry will have its detractors in town who find Birdwood's friendlier test the better day out. They are not wrong about their day. They are wrong about the ranking, which asks which course is best, and a full-strength Dye in this setting answers that.

## 2Birdwood Golf Course

Birdwood is UVA's Davis Love III course at Boar's Head, and it does the hardest job in college-town golf: serve a university programme, a resort, and the public at once, without boring any of them. Love's design language suits the piedmont, generous where the land is generous, sharper around the greens, and the whole thing sits in the kind of Blue Ridge foothill scenery that makes a mediocre hole look good and a good hole look inevitable.

It finishes second because Full Cry asks harder questions. But Birdwood is the course we would tell a visitor to play first, the accessible face of Charlottesville golf, proof that a university course can be both a working facility and a genuine destination round.

## 3Farmington Country Club

Farmington is the town's old private club, the social centre of Charlottesville golf for generations, and its third-place finish here says more about the company than the course. Against a Pete Dye resort design and a well-funded university flagship, the hometown club's quieter charms, a course its members play daily and love without needing it validated, come third on examination and first on belonging.

Access, as ever with the club on this list, is members and guests. Farmington's members will read this ranking, shrug, and go play their course, which is the correct response and also the reason clubs like it survive every era of golf fashion.

In the foothills the light goes blue on the mountains in the evening, the horses are out at Keswick, and the students are finishing at Birdwood. Charlottesville is a small town with an architect fight at the top of its ranking. Most small towns should be so lucky.

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