Beaufort

BEAUTIFUL BEAUFORT BY THE SEA it’s called, and not without reason. Nestled in among live oaks in a wide oxbow on the inland barrier island of Port Royal at the head of a system of creeks and estuaries called the Beaufort River, the once sleepy southern town is one of the loveliest on the East Coast. Beaufort is surrounded by islands and hammocks — small forested clumps of land amid the vast salt marshes. Just south of it lies Port Royal Sound, named in 1562 by the French explorer Jean Ribault, whose short-lived colony on Parris Island was the second of several attempted settlements of Beaufort prior to the permanent English one of the early eighteenth century. The sound receives the Broad River that separates Hilton Head and St. Helena Islands on the coast, a few miles downstream.