Three days in Charleston: the prettiest city in America, and it knows exactly what that cost

The first day is one long loop of the lower peninsula, maybe two miles, all of it flat.

Start at the Market, four blocks of open sheds running inland from Meeting Street, built in the 1800s as the city's produce market and never a slave market whatever the tour guides outside imply. What makes it worth an hour now is the sweetgrass baskets: coiled by hand at the tables in the middle, using a technique brought from West Africa and passed down in the Gullah communities north of the city ever since. They are expensive because they take days.

Walk south into the French Quarter, the old walled town, which is a few blocks of galleries, cobbles and churches. St Philip's steeple is the one in every photograph down Church Street, and the pink and blue houses on East Bay are Rainbow Row, painted in the 1930s by a woman restoring them who simply liked the colours.

Waterfront Park is a block east: a long pier over the Cooper River, wooden swings hanging under a roof at the end of it, and a fountain shaped like a pineapple that children wade in.

Then follow the seawall round to the Battery at the southern tip, where the grand houses face the harbour and the park under the oaks is full of Civil War guns. From the promenade you can see Fort Sumter out in the water, which is tomorrow.

The harbour and the history today, and the ferry sets the clock.

Boats to Fort Sumter leave from the wharf at the northern end of the waterfront and the round trip runs a little over two hours, an hour of which is on the island. The fort is where the Civil War started: Confederate batteries opened fire on the federal garrison in April 1861, the garrison surrendered after 34 hours, and the war ran for four years from there. The rangers on the island give a short talk and the crossing itself is the best view of the peninsula there is.

Back on shore, the International African American Museum stands on the exact spot the ferry leaves from, which is not a coincidence. Gadsden's Wharf is where something like forty per cent of all enslaved Africans brought to North America first landed, and the building is raised on columns so that the ground itself is left untouched underneath. It opened in 2023 and it is the most serious museum in the American South.

Then walk ten minutes inland to the Old Slave Mart, a small building on Chalmers Street built in 1859 when the city banned public sales in the street and the trade moved indoors. It is the last standing slave auction building in the state and it is now a museum run by the city. Half an hour, and a very quiet one.

Give the evening to dinner. This is one of the best eating cities in the country and it takes bookings weeks out.

The last morning goes fourteen miles up the Ashley River, where the rice fortunes were made and the great estates were built. Middleton Place is the one to choose if you are choosing one.

The gardens were laid out in 1741 and are the oldest landscaped gardens in the country: a formal terraced descent to two butterfly-shaped lakes, camellias, reflecting pools and allées, all of it done to a European plan by a hundred enslaved workers over ten years. In spring it is extraordinary. In any season it is the design that holds up.

The house was burned by Union troops in 1865 and only a wing survives, furnished and shown on a timed tour. Beyond the gardens is a working stableyard with coopers, blacksmiths and weavers, and Eliza's House, a freedman's cottage with an exhibition naming the enslaved people who lived and worked on the property. The site does not separate the beauty from the labour, which is the reason to come here rather than to a prettier version.

Then the airport, half an hour northeast, or the two hour drive down the coast to Savannah.