# The Best Golf Courses in Granville

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-granville-oh/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Ohio


A deep sand bunker guarding a green. Photo: Santeri Viinamäki, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Granville is a college village that looks like it was shipped in from New England, white houses, a main street that still works, and a hilltop campus above it all. The golf matches the place. It is small, old, and better than a town this size has any right to expect, mostly because Denison University has been sitting on a Donald Ross course since 1914.

That is the honest shape of this list. One course does the heavy lifting, one plays through ancient earthworks a few miles east in Newark, and one is the local option that keeps Granville golfers from having to drive anywhere. We score the golf first, then the day, then what it takes to actually get on. On those terms the order is not close at the top.

## 1Denison Golf Club

A Ross design from 1914, restored for the university that owns it. That sentence alone wins this ranking, and it is not nostalgia doing the work. Ross courses reward the player who thinks in angles rather than distances, and a century of college golfers has not worn that out. The restoration matters because old Ross courses drift. Bunkers soften, greens shrink, trees close in. Putting the course back toward what Ross drew gives Denison a claim most small-town courses cannot make: the architecture on the ground is the architecture on the paper.

The concession is access and scale. This is a university course in a village, not a resort, and nobody is flying to Ohio for it alone. It does not need them to. As the centerpiece of golf in Granville it is overqualified, and the gap to No. 2 is the widest on this page.

## 2Moundbuilders Country Club (Newark)

Moundbuilders plays through Hopewell earthworks in neighboring Newark, which makes it the strangest setting on this list by a distance. Golf courses borrow scenery all the time. Very few play across ground that was ceremonially important two thousand years ago, and the mounds are not decoration here, they shape how the course sits on the land.

Why not No. 1? Because setting, however singular, is the third thing we score, and Denison's Ross bones are the first. Moundbuilders also asks Granville readers to accept a small cheat, since it is a Newark club pulled in because the bench here is short. We would rather say that plainly than pretend Granville has three hometown courses of this level. It has one, plus this remarkable neighbor.

## 3Granville Golf Course

The local. Every golf town has one course that does the unglamorous work: league nights, junior lessons, the Saturday game that has run for years with the same four groups. Granville Golf Course is that course here, and ranking it last is a judgment about architecture, not usefulness. Measured by rounds actually played by people who live in Granville, it might finish first.

The honest concession runs the other way too. If you are visiting for Denison and have one extra slot, this is a pleasant way to fill it, not a discovery. Play it for the pace and the company. Save your strong opinions for the top of the list.

Granville, then, is a one-course town with an unusual neighbor and a solid local, and there is no shame in that shape. Most towns in Ohio would trade their whole bench for the Ross on the hill.

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