Gulf Islands National Seashore: The Mississippi Half

If you have an afternoon and no boat, this is the answer, and it is the most consistently overlooked thing on the Mississippi coast.

The Davis Bayou Area sits on the Ocean Springs side of Biloxi Bay, which from most Biloxi hotels means crossing the bridge and turning south, twenty minutes at most. What you find is a piece of coastal woodland that looks nothing like the beach road: live oaks with Spanish moss, slash pine, palmetto understorey, and a brackish bayou winding out toward the Sound through spartina marsh.

There are short trails and raised boardwalks over the wet ground, a fishing pier, a boat launch that local anglers use to reach the Sound, and a campground with water and electrical hookups, which makes this the only developed camping in the seashore's Mississippi district. The visitor centre is where to ask about island conditions, ranger programmes and whether the ferry is running that week.

Take insect repellent. A brackish bayou in a warm climate is exactly what it sounds like, and the mosquitoes in still air from May to September are serious rather than notional. Alligators live here, as they do in every coastal bayou in Mississippi; keep dogs leashed and away from the water's edge, and do not go looking for one.

The wildlife is the reason to come. Herons, egrets, osprey, occasional bald eagles, and in autumn a genuinely good run of migrating songbirds coming off the Gulf.

Horn is the island this coast is sentimental about, and the reason is a man in a rowing boat.

Walter Anderson lived in Ocean Springs and spent much of the last part of his life rowing a small skiff twelve miles out to Horn Island to work alone, sometimes for weeks, sleeping under the overturned boat. What he produced there is among the best American nature painting of the twentieth century, and the museum in Ocean Springs that holds it is a short drive from Davis Bayou. The story most often repeated on this coast has him tying himself to a tree to watch a hurricane come over the island. Take that as coast folklore rather than documented fact, but the underlying pattern is real enough: he went out there in conditions nobody else would, and he came back with the work.

The island itself is long, narrow and wooded along its spine, with slash pine, freshwater ponds and interior lagoons that hold alligators. Most of it is federally designated wilderness. There are no facilities, no water and no shelter, and the Park Service manages it to stay that way.

Two things worth knowing before romanticising it. Horn was used by the military during and after the Second World War, including for chemical and biological testing, and the island's history is not purely pastoral. And the insects in summer are, by universal local agreement, the worst on the coast. Go in October or April if you have the choice.

Gulf Islands National Seashore spans two states, and search results mix them constantly. It is worth knowing which one you are reading about.

The Florida district, around Pensacola and Santa Rosa Island, is the one most people picture: roads onto the barrier island, Fort Pickens with a campground and a drive-in entrance, long stretches of bright quartz sand, a visitor centre, and clear Gulf water directly accessible from a car park. It is roughly a two and a half hour drive east of Biloxi along Interstate 10, which makes it a long day trip at best and more sensibly an overnight.

The Mississippi district has one road-accessible unit, at a bayou, with no beach to speak of. That is the difference in a sentence.

If what you actually want is to walk from a car onto white sand facing open Gulf water, the honest advice is that Mississippi cannot give you that, and no amount of driving along US 90 will change it. Either take the ferry to Ship Island, which is the shorter and better answer, or accept a long drive east.

If what you want is the emptiest coast in the region, the Mississippi islands have something Florida stopped being able to offer decades ago, and it is out there twelve miles from a city of fifty thousand people.