# The Williamsburg Golf Guide

Source: https://thecourserankings.com/blog/williamsburg-va-golf-guide/

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Town Guides / Virginia


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

Williamsburg makes golfers drive past the golf to get to the history, which is backwards, because the best reason to stop here is a golf course from 1963. The Golden Horseshoe Gold Course is Robert Trent Jones's Colonial Williamsburg course, built for the foundation that runs the restored town, and it has outlasted every attempt to turn this place into a history trip with a golf amenity attached. Come for a weekend and the order sorts itself out quickly: the colonial streets in the evening, the golf in the morning, and the Gold Course first.

This is the Historic Triangle, Williamsburg with Jamestown and Yorktown at the corners, and the golf spreads wider than the colonial core. Kingsmill sits down on the James River, Williamsburg National sits out in the country, and the Golden Horseshoe pair sits right in town. A trip here is really three settings: town, river, and countryside. Play one of each and you have actually seen the place.

## The Gold Course is the trip, the Green Course is the argument

Play the Golden Horseshoe Gold Course on your best morning, no debate. Robert Trent Jones in 1963 was at the height of his powers and building for a client who wanted a course worthy of the setting, and the result is the kind of parkland golf that has quietly embarrassed flashier Virginia courses for sixty years. It is the headliner by architecture, by setting, and by the company it keeps in every serious ranking of the state's golf. Groups that play it last, as a finale, usually wish they had played it first and then again. Take the hint the repeat visitors give for free: if a second round at the Gold fits the schedule, the second round is the finale. The first one is the standard everything else gets measured against.

The Golden Horseshoe Green Course, its sibling on the same grounds, is where the argument starts. Families and higher handicaps often prefer it, the test is friendlier, the day is easier, and there is no shame in any of that. We would put it third on this trip, behind Kingsmill, but we would also defend it against the golfers who dismiss it as the spare course. A trip with beginners or a mixed group may honestly get more joy per dollar out of the Green than out of a hard river wind at Kingsmill, and a guide that ignores the actual group in front of it is not a guide at all.

Kingsmill River Course is the second round to secure. It sits on the James River, it hosted the LPGA on that river for years, and tournament golf on television did it a quiet favor: anyone who watched those Sundays knows the closing stretch and the water that frames it. The River Course plays bigger and more open than the Golden Horseshoe courses, the river wind is a real factor, and the whole day has a resort scale the in-town golf does not try to match. Play it in the middle of the trip. Back-to-back with the Gold it invites a comparison the Gold usually wins; separated by a day, the River Course gets to be itself.

## The countryside round and the honest logistics

Williamsburg National Golf Club is the fourth day and the local's suggestion, the course residents name when a visitor asks where they play rather than where they send tourists. Out in the country west of town, it gives the trip its one purely golfer's day: no colonial theme, no resort apparatus, just a solid public test at public money. Trips need a round like that, especially trips where the first three days came with hotels and packages attached. Play it last and the week ends at ground level, which is where golf trips should end.

Access across all four anchors is the easy kind: resort, club and public golf that a visitor can book without knowing a single Virginian. The Golden Horseshoe courses come through Colonial Williamsburg's own channels, Kingsmill through the resort, and Williamsburg National as straightforward public golf. Book the Gold Course first, because its tee sheet is the one with real demand behind it, then Kingsmill, then fit the Green and Williamsburg National into the remaining days.

Spring and fall are the seasons, and it is not close. Virginia spring gives you dogwoods and playable warmth, fall gives you the best light of the year over the James, and summer gives you Tidewater humidity that turns the last four holes into a negotiation. Summer golf here is a dawn exercise. Take the first tee time, finish by lunch, and spend the hot hours in the colonial town where the shade is.

The one mistake visitors make is treating Williamsburg as a two-course resort stop, playing the Gold and Kingsmill and driving on. That version misses the Green Course's easy charm, misses the National entirely, and worst of all misses the town at night, when the restored streets empty of day-trippers and the whole place goes quiet and strange and worth the room rate by itself.

The last light on the James catches the river holes at Kingsmill and turns the water the color of old brass. Play late once, even if the score suffers for it.

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