Town Rankings / Connecticut
The Best Golf Courses in North Stonington
North Stonington is rural eastern Connecticut, stone walls and woods, until you reach the edge of the Foxwoods operation and the woods open onto 36 holes of resort golf. Lake of Isles sits across from the casino, a Rees Jones pair built to casino resort scale, and it is effectively the whole of the town's golf story. Two courses, one address, one architect, split by a single question: who is allowed in. The North is public. The South is members and hotel keys. A two course ranking sounds thin, and it is, so this list will be candid about it. But the head to head is a real one, because the split says something honest about how resort golf sorts its customers.
1Lake of Isles North Course
The North Course gets the top spot, and access is part of the golf argument, not a distraction from it. This is Rees Jones at resort scale in New England woods and water, a big, demanding course routed around the lake the property is named for, with the carries and the scenery running together. Resort golf at this level lives or dies on whether the holes are memorable after the package details fade, and the North's lakeside stretches are the images golfers take home from Foxwoods. The woods do quiet work here too. Eastern Connecticut forest is dense enough to separate holes completely, so the round feels like a walk through the property rather than a tour of a development, and the lake keeps reappearing as both hazard and punctuation. That it is the public course, bookable by anyone driving in off the highway, makes the ranking easy to defend: the best golf in North Stonington is also the golf you can actually play.
The concession is price and difficulty in combination. Public here does not mean cheap; it means premium resort pricing, and the course defends par in ways that can wear out a mid handicapper by the back nine. Bring extra balls and a realistic set of tees. Even with the warning, the verdict holds. If you play one course in this town, it is this one, and the resort knows it, which is presumably why the public got the flagship.
2Lake of Isles South Course
The South Course is the private sibling, reserved for members and hotel guests, and its defenders start with exactly that: a quieter tee sheet, a less trafficked course, the same Jones design language and lakeside terrain without the daily fee parade. On conditioning and calm, the South may offer the better day. Golfers who have played both tend to describe the South as the more relaxed round and the North as the more dramatic one, and drama, in a ranking that scores the golf first, counts.
It finishes second on that basis and one other: a course most readers cannot access cannot anchor a town's list, no matter how pleasant the members find it. The honest summary of North Stonington golf is that it is a single resort's pair of courses, one open and one gated, sharing woods and water in a town that otherwise has farms and quiet roads. Play the North, stay the night if the South's hotel key tempts you, and credit Foxwoods with this much: in the middle of rural Connecticut, it built public golf good enough to headline its own operation, with the lake going still and dark between the two courses at the end of the day.