Beaufort

Lia spotted them before I did — a small band of wild horses picking their way along the marsh edge of Carrot Island, visible right from Beaufort’s waterfront boardwalk without a boat or a ticket required. That casual proximity to something so wild is the whole character of Beaufort in miniature: this is North Carolina’s third-oldest town, a tidy colonial seaport that has somehow kept its working harbor, its pirate history, and its barrier-island wilderness all within a few hundred yards of each other.

The historic waterfront and Blackbeard’s harbor

We spent our first evening walking Front Street, where eighteenth-century clapboard houses with widow’s walks and picket-fenced gardens face directly onto Taylor’s Creek and the harbor beyond. Beaufort Inlet was reportedly Blackbeard’s favored haunt, and his flagship, Queen Anne’s Revenge, wrecked just offshore in 1718 — its recovered cannons and artifacts now filling a wing of the North Carolina Maritime Museum, where we spent a rainy hour tracing the pirate’s last months along this coast. Afterward we ate steamed shrimp on a dockside patio, watching charter boats and sailboats slide past in the golden evening light.

Carrot Island and the wild ponies

The horses are the real draw, though, and we hired a small water taxi to cross the narrow channel to Rachel Carson Reserve, a stretch of undeveloped marsh and dune islands directly across from downtown. The ponies here are believed to descend from Spanish mustangs, feral for generations, and they move through the reserve with total indifference to visitors, grazing cordgrass up to their knees at low tide. We wandered the sandy paths for an hour, watching herons stalk the tidal flats and the ponies wade deeper into the sound as the light went gold, downtown Beaufort’s church steeples visible the whole time just across the water.

The Old Burying Ground

Back in town, we wandered the Old Burying Ground, in continuous use since 1731, where sun-worn headstones lean under ancient live oaks draped in Spanish moss. Local guides point out the grave of a young girl said to be buried in a barrel of rum so her seafaring father could bring her body home, one of dozens of small legends etched into the cemetery’s slate. It’s an eerie, beautiful corner of town, and standing there among the crooked stones, with the harbor breeze moving through the oaks, it was easy to feel just how long this small port has been quietly getting on with the business of the sea.

Getting There

Beaufort sits on North Carolina’s Crystal Coast, about a three-hour drive east from Raleigh via US-70, or roughly 40 minutes from the regional airport in New Bern. The town is compact and walkable once you arrive, with the historic waterfront, museum, and Old Burying Ground all within a few blocks of each other, though a car is useful for exploring the wider Crystal Coast and nearby Beaufort-Morehead City area, and water taxis run regularly out to Rachel Carson Reserve and the barrier islands.