Due South: Must-Visit Houses for Literature Lovers

Plus: The world’s toughest canoe race; a whiskey fan's trip to Ireland

PHOTO: NPS/KELSEY GRACZYK

Frederick Douglass’s study in Cedar Hill in Washington, D.C..

To a lover of literature, no museum visit can compare to stepping into the living spaces once occupied by a revered author. Here, we see the writing desk at which Frederick Douglass composed many of his most influential works; there, we wander the garden that inspired Eudora Welty’s florid prose. The South is rich with historic homes where the ghosts of literary lions continue to prowl. See seven of our favorites. —Crai Bower, G&G contributor

Ireland. Although it was my first visit to the Emerald Isle, traversing the rolling green countryside from Dublin to Belfast—and the distilleries along the way—felt as familiar as the backroads of my native Kentucky. A renaissance in Irish whiskey also echoes the early days of the bourbon boom, with plenty to taste and see.

Whiskey in the jar. Teeling Distllery was Dublin’s first new distillery in 125 years when it opened in 2015. The Irish whiskey landscape has since grown from just two dominant distillers to dozens. Highlights include Slane Distillery, set in a castle that also hosts concerts by the likes of Metallica and Harry Styles; Killowen, a tiny farmhouse distillery tucked among the Mourne mountains; and McConnell’s Distillery, a circa-1776 brand that’s recently been revived in a former Belfast prison.
Irish shine. Like moonshine in the South, every Irish person of a certain age I spoke with has stories of jars of homemade poitín being passed around at parties. Afforded legal status within the past decade and typically pot-distilled from malted barley, poitín offers a taste of a distillery’s unaged spirit and a link between a proud Irish tradition and early Southern distillers.
All in for gin. It isn’t all about the whiskey. At Listoke Distillery and Gin School, a small family-run operation in County Louth, I tried my hand at blending juniper berries, coriander, orris root, and other botanicals to distill a custom bottle of gin using a wee tabletop pot still. The result was surprisingly tasty!