Montage Palmetto Bluff

Palmetto Bluff covers twenty thousand acres of South Carolina Lowcountry — moss-hung live oaks, pine flatwoods, salt marsh and thirty-odd miles of river frontage on the May, the Cooper and the New. The resort sits within a planned village, so guests move between the inn, a chapel, a small store and a clutch of restaurants along streets that feel like an old river town because they were designed to.

Rooms are split between the main inn and a large number of standalone cottages with screened porches. There is a Jack Nicklaus golf course, a shooting club, a full equestrian centre, boats for tidal-creek fishing and kayaking, and a spa set among the oaks. The kitchens make heavy use of Lowcountry staples: oysters, shrimp, stone-ground grits.

Savannah is about forty minutes south, Hilton Head twenty minutes east — near enough for a day out, far enough that the property stays quiet.