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Mention the South and you get two stock reactions. A warm, spreading smile at the thought of all those Mississippi gamblers and their Dixie belles, taking mint juleps on timeless verandas. Or a slow, solemn nod, as though you have just mentioned something deeply sacred to the heart of America, the only part left with soul, legend, poetry, romance.

This romance may seem a little elusive when you are queueing for bacon and grits behind old men in baseball caps who have to be reminded to wear shoes for breakfast. Or spending the night in one of those incredible out-of-town Malls, which are literally inaccessible to pedestrians.

But romance cannot be laid on like tap water, and those who go for it bull-headed are sure to miss it. Especially when they hope to catch sight of it through the bottom of a glass. And you may as well know now that any possible Southern romance is unlikely to be alcohol-assisted. For this is not really drinking country at all.

At Jack Daniel’s distillery in Lynchburg, I began to feel good after gazing for some minutes into a twenty-foot vat of fermenting rye, the famous sour mash. My guide confirmed that a full day’s shift can induce a certain light-headedness in young workers, but nothing to worry about.

Yet this - and a free bottle a month - is the nearest any Lynchburgers get to a drink. For we are in Moore County, Tennessee, where nobody felt like repealing Prohibition. And it is one of many such counties all over the South where bars are unheard-of and just a single can of beer in the glove compartment can land you in court.

Even where some licence is permitted, the puritan stare is unblinking. “Where there’s a church, there’s a pub”, I seem to remember from my boyhood in a Kent village. Those villagers would be much baffled by the American South, where churches outnumber bars at least five to one.

Yet I have reason to be grateful to the spiritual sector. For America’s town-planners proceed on the rash assumption that every motorist knows the area like the back of his hand. Just finding somewhere to pull in and look at the map for two minutes can be a long and frustrating exercise. And almost the only available spaces seem to be in the well-kept driveways of these various religious centres to be found all over the suburbs. While not a religious man, I owe some small offering of thanks to any number of Mount Zions, Adventist Missions, Calvary Baptists, Epiphany Lutherans and Good Shepherd Deliverance Temples who granted me some remission from the purgatory of being clamped to the never-ending trail.

A final word on drink - just one for the road. In this most car-conscious of countries, drunk driving is positively the number one offence on the highway. Even moderate speeding is pounced on hard enough, and I was pulled in for it twice. But had there been one drop of alcohol in my blood, I would even now be serving a jail sentence somewhere in Jasper County, South Carolina, and this column might be an advertisement for suitcases or cigarettes.

Perhaps the myth of the Southern belle is too popular to tamper with. Yet anyone naïve enough to expect Vivien Leigh round every corner will be shocked at the reality of Southern womanhood, bulging shapelessly out of pink polyester wherever you look, faces inert and incurious, complexions somehow dead and blank. Not that we should sneer at a long-depressed region whose better-looking daughters have obviously made it to California or Manhattan. But what about that myth ?

I think ‘Southern belle’ referred to a state of femininity, much encouraged in the cotton days, when a wife would receive lifelong adoration with every extravagant whim granted, on condition that she did not try to talk business, politics or war.

Yet in the very city whose Ordinance of Secession led to war - Columbia, South Carolina - a fine statue commemorates the women of the Confederacy in terms that are anything but patronising. The lengthy tribute, continued on all four sides of the plinth, suggests that when war allowed them to leave off their flouncing and fluttering, they had the stomach for a long, hard struggle that lasted well beyond the armistice, as it became clear that their palmy days had indeed Gone with the Wind.

The tribute reveals another irony. Frequent references to ‘this country in its hour of need’ seem to be celebrating some golden victory, instead of mourning a devastating defeat. As with so many Southern memorials, a poorly-educated visitor could go home with the impression that the South had actually won, and that the Confederate States of America is still a heroic reality. For this is a region where portraits of Jefferson Davis still hang in motel lounges and young boys are still proud to get toy Confederates for Christmas.

A simple weatherboard facade with shuttered windows. A few planks to make a front porch. A couple of white-painted columns. And there you have the classic plantation house, part of the immortal fabric of Dixieland. Why this plain architecture should exert such a powerful spell is a mystery, but it remains the soul of the downhome farming tradition, and its familiar shapes are deeply etched on the Southern mind.

Visitors too can be captivated by it. Approaching Savannah, I came off the Interstate a couple of exits too soon and found myself entering town through a long deserted boulevard of these mansions, overhung with luxuriant Spanish moss draped from the live-oaks. I could have been driving through some other century. Although not quite Antebellum (pre-Civil War), they echo the buildings that stood in the same place during the long summer of the cotton industry, from about 1800.

For Savannah was laid out by one of the most popular English colonists, James Oglethorpe, who copied an ancient drawing of an imaginary classical city. It was an act of genius, as the streets and squares on his grid were broad enough to accommodate houses much bigger than the first modest dwellings that occupied them. So it was that the wealth that eventually centred on this great deep-water port was converted into a city whose dignity and grace have enchanted the world ever since. Even Sherman decided to leave it be. Today those streets and squares are a triumph of maturity, their edges softened with age, their gardens sleepy with wisteria. In pleasing contrast the riverfront pulses with life, and its cobblestone ramps lead down to a fantastic warren of galleries, boutiques, bars and restaurants serving the freshest of the local seafood, perhaps sauteed in Burgundy, garlic and teriyaki. In all the Southern states, there is not a city more harmonious in its entirety than old Savannah.

Often mentioned in the same breath is Charleston, South Carolina - to me at least, a little too English. But there is no denying the magnificence of those three-storey mansions along The Battery with their grand colonnades glowing rose-coloured in the dusk. (Eager faces watched from these tall windows in April 1861 as the first shots of the Civil War pounded Fort Sumter just across the bay, and the Stars and Stripes was hauled down in favour of the Confederate Stars and Bars.) Several hundred Antebellum homes, many of them pre-revolution, make for a pretty impressive architectural tour, though the city does claim to be more than just an open-air museum. Take, for example, its gastronomic success. If Southern hospitality means anything, it is this enthusiastic pride in good cookery and polished service that can be found in the restaurants of Charleston - and very few other places. (New Orleans hardly belongs to the old South, as we shall find.) Yet Charleston occupies no great culinary crossroads. It mostly serves up the best of the coastal cuisine such as she-crab soup (it’s the roe), sea-scallops and pecan pie, with a few Cajun specialities like Alligator and Shrimp sauteed in delicious hot spices whose identity I could not wrest from the enigmatic waitress in Poogan’s Porch, Queen Street.

It is no slur on Carolina if I say that except for golfers and yachtsmen, you will instinctively want to head West, and it is exhilarating to pick out the first steep crests of the Great Smoky Mountains, six thousand feet high as they rear up towards Tennessee. Roughly at this point, on the long, empty road between Shelby and Marion, I was granted one of those rare moments of enchantment that just drop from heaven. In splendid solitude stood an old two-storey plantation house with flaky white paint and a wisp of smoke rising from the chimney. Suddenly out of a dark angry rainstorm there came one brilliant shaft of sunlight, smiling through the tears, bringing the little scene to life, touching it with a fresh blaze of greenery. And this I recognized as a brief, vivid snapshot of the Deep South that I had come to meet.

Yet I was on my way up to a city so untypical of the Deep South, that it could have come from Lost Horizon. The name Asheville meant nothing to me until an old man, born in these mountains, urged me not to miss it. From the start, there was something eerily quiet about this high, stony turret of North Carolina, a sense of vanished civilization, the silence after the symphony. All around were exotic Art Deco buildings of marble and granite that spoke of the confident expansionism of other days. These were in fact built on the great tobacco and textile fortunes of the Twenties, before both the local banks crashed, with disastrous consequences for such an isolated town. Today its prosperity is more muted - tourism, service industries, a big university. So these grand experimental structures, some Gothic, some apparently French-Canadian, remain with their proud archways and castellations as monuments to an earlier Asheville.

Two other Asheville monuments should not be missed. One is the superb Vanderbilt château a few minutes out of town, known as Biltmore. The other is the boarding-house where Thomas Wolfe grew up. To this day, his autobiographical novel Look Homeward, Angel can divide senior Asheville citizens with its frank disclosures about daily life in this unusually scenic city within its grey mountain crucible, sometimes preferring to see rather than be seen.

Crossing the Great Smokies into Tennessee, you notice two things. They drive worse. And your hotel-room has two door-chains, not one. But that is compared with genteel Carolina. If your mind has to change down a couple of gears to negotiate the rocky road, then so be it. For you are now entering the Volunteer State, whose rugged features are so unmistakeable that you can easily spot them from the plane at thirty thousand feet. Its friendliness is spontaneous and heartwarming. You cross the stateline at Gatlinburg, and few places can be more welcoming than this mountain town with its timbered saloons and legendary sky-lift. Across the road, but also across a great gulf of dubious taste, lies Dollywood. Yet Miss Parton’s crude dazzle is as profoundly Tennesseean as the stoic suffering of the Blues singers, the dogged resilience of Davy Crockett or the slow, eternal rhythm of the Mississippi.

Inevitably the great river cannot live up to its legend all the time. Seeking my first glimpse of it from the famous double-arched bridge at Memphis, I was in fact more impressed with the mighty clutch of skyscrapers beside it, glinting majestically in the sun, as I also was at Nashville - the only two places where I have actually recognized a sculptural aspect in these generally soulless structures. Somehow they have crystallised into something gem-like, more than just Real Estate. Perhaps they have drawn some element of hard beauty from the Tennessee soil.

The rough-diamond quality of Memphis has long been a cliché - hard rock overlaid with a raw wail of blues from the bootleg dens of Beale Street, beloved of Muddy Waters and Satch. Yet the city’s most famous son was characterised by a mysterious soft charm. Cruising down Elvis Presley Boulevard, you literally miss Graceland the first time around. You cannot believe that the dignified two-storey mansion to your left could possibly be the scene of that supposedly hell-raising life. “Reg’lar guy” was how the doorman remembered him. Should that be surprising ? Well, I for one was not prepared for the discreet good taste within, give or take a few twelve-foot sofas and a TV room where the King would watch six channels at once. And it is a touching experience to circle the little garden where he now lies in peace beside his mother and father, for he often came here to sit quietly and reflect. Maybe the estate is just doing its image-building best, but I took away the impression of a very reg’lar guy indeed.

Chattanooga belongs firmly on the sleeve of a Glenn Miller album, where it is a large innocent name, dancing with fun. In reality, it is a town of unrelieved ordinariness, all too plainly confirmed from the lofty vantage-point of Lookout Mountain - a breathtaking view of nothing very much. (Deep inside this mountain, however, the Ruby Falls makes a dramatic climax to your tour of the caverns.)

Downtown, the Chattanoogans were liable to weave and cut in and out of traffic so viciously that I found myself starting to drive badly too. So I did the only possible thing. Grabbing the nearest exit, I simply quit town, to embark on one of the loveliest evening drives of my life, out across the glittering Tennessee River towards Nashville, through wide open forests that reminded me vividly of the Scottish Highlands.

Whether or not time stood still, I know that I was allowed a magical extra hour to linger among this spectacular scenery, since it is here that you cross from Eastern into Central Time, a most welcome bonus for anyone heading West on a fine day.

As for the State of Mississippi, I am convinced that it dwells on a different time-scale altogether - possibly because I was following the 8000-year old buffalo trail known as the Natchez Trace. This has been converted into a scenic highway, from which the sight of billboards, flashing motel signs, even commercial vehicles, has been rigorously outlawed, and the eye can rest on never-ending vistas of white oak and hickory, maple and dogwood, cypress and wild azalea. At first, the idea of such a long, thin forest can seem artificial to a degree, but in fact it creates a most vivid sensation of timelessness, the scenery growing wilder and more dense as you move South.

It was evening. But it was some strange everlasting evening. A vast honey-coloured moon dipped towards the horizon, but never reached it. Each mile seemed longer than the last. As civilisation receded, an older land began to look you slowly in the eye. Chickasaw Indians would have canoed past these same bulrushes, gazed up at the enveloping pines and wondered if the great moon face in the sky could see them. Whether or not their spirits were about, you certainly felt a shift in your perception of time and distance (it even seemed unnatural to look at your watch) under the spell of this long, winding tunnel of ancient America.

End of the line is, of course, Natchez itself. If there is a more spectacular collection of early Southern mansions to be found in such a small area, then I have missed something sensational, though William Faulkner’s home-town of Oxford, Mississippi and the nearby Holly Springs can boast something like it. The historic river-port was prosperous indeed in its day, and the whole Southern architectural tradition can be seen unfolding here among the camellias and sweet olives. Starting with the colonial timber-frame houses of the 1780’s, you note the classical columns asserting themselves a few years later, and then the full glory of the Greek-temple style with its high ceilings and richly detailed wrought iron.

An hour or two up-river at Vicksburg, you can actually stay in half-a-dozen mansions of this vintage, now converted into some of the most tasteful guest-houses of their kind. In the elegant front-parlour of Cedar Grove, an embedded cannonball reminds us of the great siege of 1863, after which U.S. Grant decided to parole 30,000 prisoners, earning such respect from the town that it later held a memorial service for him - unheard-of in the Deep South. Touring civil-war sites can sometimes feel like a grim duty, but Vicksburg is a happy exception. And a night or two among the chintz and gaslight of more gracious times, with a four-poster bed and a good plantation breakfast, could well be the supreme experience of old Dixie.

I told a well-travelled colleague that I might miss out New Orleans. He immediately regarded me with that detached amusement that we reserve for lunatics. And he had a point. Hell’s Teeth, I was about to drive five thousand miles around one corner of America much neglected by tourists and not always unjustly. Yet I was prepared to sneak from Mississippi into Alabama while passing almost within sight of one of the great pleasure-capitals of the world.

Not that it matters, but I too had a point. New Orleans cannot be classified as a Southern city because it cannot be classified at all. Only a morning’s drive from Texas, it views itself as quite distinct from the old South, more Latin altogether. (A French-quarter newsagent roared with appreciation at the title of my Dollarwise Guide to the Southeast and New Orleans.) And surely anything less than a week would be an affront to this grand and glorious city. For a start, it would take you at least a week to give up saying “New Orleans” in favour of “Nawl’ns”, the scrambled monosyllable into which the locals have pared down that rather gracious name. Bourbon Street alone could happily occupy a week - happily if not very creatively.

So it was natural that a hopscotch leap in and out of New Orleans should leave me wanting more. Much more. Like Savannah, it offers you everything you expect - and still takes your breath away. For example, a stroll through that village-network of old streets between Jackson Square on the river and Louis Armstrong Park soon reveals that this is only the Inner French Quarter. North from here are another two miles of these colonial town-houses with their brightly-coloured frontages and eternally seductive wrought-iron screens. However, you will soon gravitate back to that small inner grid of famous streets, partly because anywhere else is liable to be unsafe at night, and partly because night is when this intimate little corner comes into its own.

Of the world’s red-light districts, this is the triumphant veteran that has raised itself above the seedy and the sinister - a good-time goddess able to blend passion with compassion. These old steps and archways have watched centuries of human frailty, and view it with a shrug and a wink. The Absinthe House on Bourbon Street proudly displays its marble fountain, temporarily removed during Prohibition. My hotel, the Dauphine Orleans, makes sure I realise that its licence to accommodate lewd women expired in 1858.

True, the bar-owners and club-managers will be beckoning you in keenly, whether it’s a unisex striparama with audience participation, a female mud-wrestling tournament or one of those voodoo sessions that spice the local mind, for New Orleans has always relished the occult. But there is no obvious attempt to fleece the tourist, and even the hookers don’t hustle you - just a lazy “Okay” as you decline the goods.

Do not, however, expect the restaurants to stay open late. Except during Mardi Gras, last orders will be at ten sharp. Lunchtime is the more moveable feast, and you will have little trouble enjoying the famous New Orleans creole cookery with its lavish sauces or the jumping hot Cajun cuisine all through the afternoon. For this is the idle café society at its most delightful. It had to be in one of these cafés, the Degas on Esplanade Avenue, that a young scientist friend of mine, surely a reliable witness, looked down at her hand to see, perched on one finger, nothing less than a baby chameleon.

The State capitals tend to be much of a breed : small, manageable cities, high-domed and dignified, where law secretaries and government clerks are happy to take a sandwich lunch in the well-kept gardens that flank the great granite centres of power. Although not perhaps worth a detour, these towns can make a satisfying break in a long day’s drive. Columbia SC, with its unusually imaginative State museum. Jackson MS, and its high-tech planetarium. Baton Rouge LA, offering a prime view over the delta. Tallahassee, which sounds as wild as a rebel yell, but is in fact a charming hilly town close to Florida’s gulf coast.

But then the pattern is broken by Atlanta.

The biggest thing about Atlanta is size itself, and no golden-domed state house has ever been so dwarfed by the glass towers surrounding it. Perhaps the very speed of its recent growth makes it hard to focus on, and to me it lacks either a face or a shape. Also, for a city of its size, it proved woefully unready for the ’96 Olympics, revealing to a wider world the sluggish small-town mentality that some of us had already noted, along with its somewhat desperate slogan ‘Too Busy to Hate’. Yet the atmosphere is positive and optimistic. (New Yorkers can hardly believe the casual “How y’all doin’?” from strangers in the street.) On a single day of my visit, the biggest building conference in history received a Presidential visit, a white-supremacist rally was dispersed before it reached the Luther King Memorial, and the birthday parade for Robert E. Lee (the slave-owners’ champion) was addressed by a prominent black councillor - a tense moment that ended in a standing ovation.

Thanks to Gone With The Wind, we need not linger over why so few fine old houses are still standing in Atlanta. The novelist’s own timber-framed dwelling is as old as most and draws many visitors, intrigued by this petite sharp-eyed reporter - not a beauty - who had seldom set foot outside the city when a taxi knocked her down fatally in Peachtree Street at the age of forty-seven. Ironically, the cabmen still make poor pathfinders, not helped by almost thirty streets being named Peachtree. Mostly geared to the conference trade, with high-class restaurants and nightclubs oddly sited a little out of the centre in Buckhead, the city has reason to prefer its future to its past. Its invention of Coca-Cola, however, will always give Atlanta some kind of immortality. And amid the smooth efficiency of its airport, I reflect - just once for ever - on the sea-green beauty of its name.

In Tallahassee I smelt the South. And I knew that it was a different South - a thing of beach-huts and barbecues, mosquito-nets and tall Caribbean cocktails. Florida.

Behind me, fading into the horizon, was the Old South, the Deep South, the Rebel States, Dixieland, Swannee.

That last rear-mirror view reminds me that the South is not for everyone. At its vibrant best, it is for those who love mountains and music, and that means Tennessee. At the other end of the scale, there are many older visitors who like to bask in the Florida sun, but don’t usually venture into cities. They should add a couple of days’ break in Savannah or Charleston. Civil War buffs, of course, will find endless monuments to that epic struggle, but except for Virginia’s wonderful Shenandoah Valley, the battlegrounds are not especially scenic.

Perhaps the South is for those romantic fools, sentimental enough to pursue a dream of Dixie through the bewildering bustle of Atlanta, the stomp-and-wail of Memphis, the glimmering gold of the Tennessee River, the camellia-white mansions of yesteryear, and that long, mysterious trail out of time itself towards a huge, slow Mississippi moon that never sets.

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