Town Rankings / New Hampshire

The Best Golf Courses in Portsmouth

Portsmouth is a working seaport that got handsome. Ships, bricks, breweries, and just enough tourists to keep the locals complaining. Its golf splits three ways, and the split tells you the whole story of Seacoast New Hampshire: a private course on Great Bay drawn by one of the biggest names in American design, a private club down the coast in Rye, and a city course built on a closed air base, which is about as Portsmouth a sentence as you can write.

This ranking scores the golf first, then the day, then access, and access matters here more than usual because two of the three doors are locked to the public. The best course and the most useful course are not the same course in Portsmouth. We rank the best one first and say so plainly.

1Portsmouth Country Club (Greenland)

The Robert Trent Jones course on Great Bay is the top of this list and it is not especially close. Jones built in the era when American golf design thought big: bold bunkering, water carried as a threat rather than decoration, greens that ask you to fly it to a number. Putting that examination on the shore of Great Bay, in Greenland just outside town, gave the Seacoast a private course with a real architectural spine and a setting most inland clubs would trade their clubhouse for.

The bay is not scenery here. It is wind, and the wind off Great Bay rearranges a Jones design in ways the drawing never intended, usually for the better. A course that can be played two different ways depending on which way the air is moving off the water stays interesting for the member who walks it 80 times a year, which is the hardest test any private course faces.

The concession is the gate. Portsmouth Country Club is private, the estimates for clubs of this level on the Seacoast run high, and most golfers reading a Portsmouth ranking will never play it without a member's invitation. That costs it on access. It does not cost it the top spot, because the golf is the golf: the strongest design in the area, on the best piece of water, by a name that still carries weight.

2Abenaqui Country Club (Rye)

Down the coast in Rye, Abenaqui is the quieter private option, seacoast golf in the older New England register: a members' club near the ocean, serving the summer and year round population of one of the wealthiest little towns in the state. Where Portsmouth Country Club announces itself with a famous architect and a bay, Abenaqui keeps its voice down.

There is a real argument for the understatement. Seacoast golf at its best is wind, firm ground, and salt in the air, and a club does not need a marquee designer to deliver that if the land and the weather cooperate. Abenaqui's members are not short of options, Rye sits within reach of strong golf in three directions, and they stay. Membership loyalty at a quiet club is evidence, even if it never makes a headline.

The knock is that quiet can shade into ordinary. Without the Jones pedigree or the Great Bay stage, Abenaqui needs its best holes to do work its reputation does not, and in a three course town that leaves it second. A good second. The kind of club most golfers would happily join and happily defend, while conceding the course up the road is the one visitors ask about.

3Pease Golf Course

Pease is the people's course, and its biography is the best story on this list. The city course sits on the old air base, Pease Air Force Base, closed and converted into a tradeport with runways, offices, and golf where the military used to be. Only in America does a decommissioned base become the municipal answer, and Portsmouth golfers are lucky it did.

Pease gives the Seacoast what the two private clubs cannot: a tee time anyone can book. For a visitor in town for a weekend, this is not the third best option, it is the only option, and it carries that responsibility decently. Public golf on interesting land, priced for the public, is the load bearing wall of the game in most towns, and Portsmouth's wall happens to have a control tower in its past.

The concession runs the other way from the clubs above it. Pease cannot match a Trent Jones layout on Great Bay for design, and no municipal budget matches private conditioning money. It finishes third on golf and first on usefulness, and both things can be true at once.

Play Pease because you can, angle for Portsmouth Country Club because you should, and take the Rye invitation if it comes. The Seacoast gives you one of each, which is more than most small cities on the water manage.