Custom Primland Resort artwork, made to order — a hand-styled map of the course, a painting-style print of your favorite hole, or a finished photo from your round.
Created from actual data — every tee, fairway, bunker, and green, all in vivid detail.
Primland began not with golf but with land — a lot of it. Starting in 1977, Didier Primat, a French industrialist of the Schlumberger oilfield-services family, quietly assembled roughly 12,000 acres of the Blue Ridge Mountains above the hamlet of Meadows of Dan, Virginia. For decades it was a sporting estate in the European tradition: driven pheasant shoots, sporting clays, trout streams, and mile after mile of ridge and gorge with nothing man-made in sight.
When Primat decided his mountain kingdom should have a golf course, he hired the English architect Donald Steel, with Martin Ebert leading the design work on the ground. Their challenge was almost comic in scale — twelve thousand acres to choose from, nearly all of it tilted. The solution was to lay the Highland Course along the ridge tops at close to 3,000 feet, with fairways running the spines and greens hanging above the Dan River Gorge, the Pinnacles of Dan, and the North Carolina Piedmont rolling away below. It opened in 2006, and Golf Digest named it the Best New Public Course of 2007 in the upscale category.
Primat died in 2008, months before the estate's great Lodge opened — a stone-and-timber retreat crowned, improbably, with a silver observatory dome, because at this elevation and this remoteness the night sky performs as dramatically as the daytime views. His family carried the vision forward, and since 2021 Primland has been managed as part of the Auberge Resorts Collection, with treehouse rooms cantilevered over the gorges and the golf course still rated the best you can play in Virginia by both Golf Digest and Golfweek.
What stays with golfers is the silence. No houses line these fairways and none ever will; the nearest town is a crossroads. You play along the roof of Virginia with the clouds working through the valleys below, and on some mornings — locals will tell you — you are quite literally playing above them.
Museum-quality map art of Primland's Highland Course, traced from real course data — every ridge-top fairway, green, and bunker at 3,000 feet in the Blue Ridge. Four designs, six sizes, or personalized with your round photo.
Course data © OpenStreetMap contributors (ODbL)