Long Island is so crowded with great old golf that a good course can hide in plain sight, and Westhampton Country Club is one of those quiet ones. It is a Seth Raynor design, lesser known than its neighbors and perhaps underappreciated, fit onto just over 125 acres of tight ground along the Atlantic coast. What it lacks in fame it repays in personality, because it feels more raw than Raynor's later work, and you can sense that in the ground. The club is older than its golf course by a long way. It was founded in 1890 as a recreational club for local residents and for wealthy New York City families who had begun summering outside the city. There was tennis, there was sailing, and there was baseball, which held a prominent place until Raynor redesigned the golf course. Golf came in modestly, with a nine-hole course from 1896 to 1902 and another from 1903 to 1915. In 1914, in anticipation of a new eighteen, the club left Beach Lane for its present ground. Raynor's course opened in the spring of 1916, around the time he split with Charles Blair Macdonald, which makes Westhampton one of his first solo designs. The Raynor name was not new here. Jonathan Raynor, a relative, was among Westhampton's first non-native residents. Later another relative, William Raynor, managed the yacht club from the 1920s to the 1930s. There is something fitting in a Raynor shaping this stretch of the south shore. The course is full of the forms he made famous, yet it feels entirely its own. The seventh is a Redan. The third is a Punchbowl ringed by oddly shaped bunkers. The 11th is a Short. The 13th is a Leven-esque par 4, guarded by a large horseshoe mound that rises like a sleeping animal. Patterned mounds are scattered around the course and between holes, little ripples that give the whole place a playful texture. It is less refined and less engineered than the work he became known for, and that rawness is the charm. The ninth is a stiff Bottle, playing more than 440 yards from the back tees. The riskier line from the tee is the thinner fairway to the right, and even that target is blocked at the front by a burn flowing across the fairway. Another hole seems to imitate the 14th at the Wissahickon course of Philadelphia Cricket Club, with a flying vee of bunkers pointing away from the green, challenging anyone who chooses to lay up short of the bunkers that tighten the fairway. Then comes the 17th, a Biarritz playing the full 205 yards to an up-and-down putting surface. On a course measuring a modest 6,350 to 6,500 yards, that is a long, honest ask late in the round. For all its tight boundaries, Westhampton feels wide open. In 2009 Gil Hanse completed a restoration, clearing trees, expanding greens, and bringing back some of Raynor's original bunkering. The result is a course that seems to breathe beside the sea. The sea has not always been kind. In 1938 one of the deadliest hurricanes in American history, nicknamed the Long Island Express, centered on the exposed south coast of Long Island, and the destruction in and around Westhampton was extraordinary. Some of the dead had to be kept for a time in the clubhouse. It is a sobering thing to know when you stand there on a bright afternoon, and it deepens the place rather than darkening it. What remains is an unabashedly fun golf course that punches above its weight in a region full of heavyweights. It is early Raynor, a little rough at the edges, and all the better for it.