Courses

Best golf courses near Aiken, SC

Below, you’ll find a list of courses near Aiken, SC. There are 20 courses within a 15-mile radius of Aiken, 8 of which are public courses and 9 are private courses. There are 12 18-hole courses and 8 nine-hole layouts.

The above has been curated through Golf Digest’s Places to Play course database, where we have collected star ratings and reviews from our 1,900 course-ranking panelists. Join our community by signing up for Golf Digest+ and rate the courses you’ve visited recently.

Palmetto Golf Club
Private
Palmetto Golf Club
Aiken, SC
4.3
86 Panelists
Golf in Aiken began over a century ago with two in-town courses, Palmetto Golf Club and Aiken Golf Club. Palmetto, founded in 1892, was primarily designed by Herbert Leeds, the builder of Myopia Hunt Club near Boston, with major amendments in 1932 by Alister MacKenzie who was working on Augusta National (just 30 miles away). Ranking comfortably inside our Third 100 Greatest Courses, it’s a polished, jewel-box design draped over up and down topography with one of the country’s great sets of greens full of slick interior movements that slip away into a variety of undulous chipping areas.
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The Aiken Golf Club
Public
The Aiken Golf Club
Aiken, SC
4.2
4 Panelists
Just outside Augusta, Ga., and about an hour from Columbia, S.C., Aiken Golf Club is a short, old-school public layout that dates to 1912 when the first 11 holes were laid out as an amenity to the Highland Park Hotel (closed during the Depression), with several running parallel to the rail line that transported guests in and out of town. Owned by the McNair family since 1959 and just steps from the historic downtown, it possesses the many of the same assets as nearby Palmetto though in less refined form with ocean-surge greens, sporty length, eccentric bygone shaping, tantalizing short par 4s and significant fairway movements across the hilly terrain. Very few places have more eclectic or expressive golf packed into a $26-48 green fee. Jim McNair, who operates Aiken Golf Club, is also responsible for locating and building The Chalkmine, a nine-hole short course and practice area for The First Tee of Aiken on a defunct sand and chalk mining site that might have some of the most exciting holes in the county.
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The Reserve Club: Woodside
Private
The Reserve Club: Woodside
Aiken, SC
4
32 Panelists
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The Reserve Club: Hollow Creek
Private
The Reserve Club: Hollow Creek
Aiken, SC
3.6
12 Panelists
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Sage Valley Golf Club
Private
Sage Valley Golf Club
Graniteville, SC
Built just down I-20 from Augusta National, there's no mistaking Sage Valley's resemblance to its neighbor. The pine straw, the perfect conditioning and symmetric mowing paterns, the perfect bunker sand—it's all an ode to Augusta, where Tom Fazio, the architect at Sage Valley, served as the consulting architect for many years. Sage Valley has plenty of room off the tee, similar to its counterpart, but less drastic green complexes, characteristic of Fazio's approach—giving higher-handicappers a chance to run balls up on the ground in some spots—actually similar to how Augusta was originally designed by Dr. Mackenzie. Sage Valley fell off our Second 100 Greatest rankings in 2019 due to a lack of ballots—but it returned in 2023-'24.
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Mount Vintage Golf Club: Championship Course
0
8 Panelists
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The River Golf Club: River
Public
The River Golf Club: River
North Augusta, SC
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