So you thought American history was so short that the antiques were still under guarantee? Welcome to Bath, North Carolina. It was founded in 1705, and houses of that period still stand. Its old church is worth visiting and lacks one period feature - the balcony where the black slaves had to go to keep them apart from the white congregation. Still, at least North Carolina managed to scrap that kind of thing about 150 years before, say, Alabama.

The mayor, Barbara Modlin, bought us lunch - delicious local yams, collards (like kale) and cornbread, with local pork chop - and we had a thoroughly enjoyable and very interesting stay in this charming small town.

Oh, it was the home of the pirate Blackbeard too: a six-foot tall man with a foot-long beard in pigtails decorated with ribbons who walked round with a smouldering twist of gunpowder behind each ear and was married 14 times. It took decades for the then equivalent of the FBI to catch him - no doubt because they had trouble spotting him - so as you can see little changes.