# The Best Golf Courses in Manchester, Vermont

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/the-best-golf-courses-in-manchester-vt/

[The Course Rankings](/)

Town Rankings / Vermont


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

Ekwanok dates to 1899. Walter Travis designed it, in the Battenkill valley in southern Vermont, and it hosted a U.S. Amateur. Say those three facts slowly, because together they describe a kind of club that barely exists anymore in American golf: a nineteenth century walking club, by one of the game's great early figures, on valley ground in a small Vermont town, that has stayed itself while the sport around it changed beyond recognition.

Manchester has two courses to rank, and the ranking is not hard, but the reasons are worth doing properly. Ekwanok is the private institution. Equinox is its resort sibling, the course visitors can actually play, attached to the hotel that anchors the town's tourist life. One is Manchester's golf history. The other is Manchester's golf business. A ranking has to weigh both truths without letting either one bully the other.

We score the golf first, then the day, then access. Here, the gap in the first category is wide enough that access never gets to cast the deciding vote.

## 1Ekwanok Country Club

Ekwanok is No. 1, and it would be No. 1 in most towns in New England, let alone its own.

Travis, 1899. Architects of his era built golf that modern players keep rediscovering as smarter than what replaced it, and a Travis course that has been cared for in the same valley for well over a century is a living archive of how the game was meant to walk and think. The walking part is not nostalgia. Ekwanok is described as a walking club, which in 2026 is a deliberate philosophy: golf at foot pace, caddie culture, the round as a walk in the Battenkill valley rather than a cart ride between photo stops. Clubs that kept that faith through the cart era did so because their members believed it was the better game. Time has been kind to their side of the argument.

The U.S. Amateur hosting is the competitive credential. The Amateur is the championship most closely tied to the game's old values, and a course entrusted with it in the Travis era had to be a genuine test, not a pretty field. That a small town Vermont club earned that trust places Ekwanok in national company that its size never promised.

The Battenkill setting completes the case. The valley is famous fishing country, low and green between mountains, and golf in it has a calm that resort corridors cannot fake. The concession is access, and it is total. Ekwanok is private, old line private, and almost every golfer reading this will never play it. We do not dock rankings into meaninglessness for that, but we state it plainly: this No. 1 is, for most of you, a course to read about and admire from the road.

If the invitation ever comes, rearrange the calendar. Courses like this are why the ranking exists.

## 2Equinox Golf Club

Equinox is second, and for the visiting golfer it is effectively first, a distinction we can hold in both hands without contradiction.

As the resort sibling to Ekwanok, attached to the town's big hotel tradition, Equinox carries the entire public facing weight of Manchester golf. Guests book the hotel, play the course, walk the town's outlets and inns, and go home believing they have experienced Manchester golf. For nearly all of them, they have. The resort round in this valley, mountains on both sides, village Vermont all around, is a good day by any honest measure, and the course's job is to deliver that day reliably to golfers of every level who share its tee sheet.

The concession defines its ceiling. A resort course cannot be Ekwanok, and does not pretend to be. It lacks the Travis pedigree, the championship history, and the walking club purity, and standing in the same town as a course that has all three makes second place a permanent address rather than a staging post.

That is fine. Towns need both kinds of golf, and Manchester is luckier than most in having an authentic version of each. Equinox gives the game away to anyone who books a room. Ekwanok keeps the flame that makes the town's golf matter in the first place.

The last word belongs to the valley itself: a river famous for trout, a village under the mountains, and at its edge a course from 1899 still being walked, still being played the slow way, while the rest of American golf rushes past it on the highway to somewhere newer.

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