W hite mist hangs low over the bayou and the water is deathly still. For a while nothing moves; it’s pin-drop quiet. Then a snowy egret pushes off from a cypress knee, wings spread wide, its belly inches from acid-green lily pads. This swamp has life aplenty — it just keeps it close to its chest.

I’m boating in the Northshore region of Louisiana — a tangle of marshes, swamps and Spanish-moss-draped towns on the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, the brackish body of water that swoops northward from New Orleans. This area is less than an hour by car from the Big Easy, reached via a white-knuckle drive across Lake Pontchartrain Causeway — yet, despite its proximity to the Deep South’s most stirring city, it remains an enigma to most Brits.

However, that could well be about to change. Where the Crawdads Sing, the film adaptation of the bestselling 2018 Delia Owens novel, hit UK cinemas on Friday. It follows Kya Clark (played by Daisy Edgar-Jones, of the BBC drama Normal People), a young girl abandoned by her family and forced to survive alone in the coastal marshes — Owens anchored her novel in North Carolina, but the bayou country of Louisiana was chosen as the filming location. And, as it turns out, it steals the show.

“The landscapes were just exquisite,” Olivia Newman, the director, tells me. “We needed to find the beautiful marshlands, the swamps, the cypress trees, the big old live oaks, and when we were scouting we found all those different textures in and around New Orleans.”

I discover them for myself on a pontoon boat ride with Captain Mike Jones, a man with bayou water for blood and a penchant for bucket hats. He has been running Louisiana Tours and Adventures for seven years, taking folks deep into the Tchefuncte River system. “I’ve spent most of my life out here,” he says as we ease out from a wooden jetty in Fairview-Riverside State Park, a key Crawdads filming location. “There’s nowhere else in the world like it.”

There’s a bounty of wildlife and history here, Jones tells me: the river is named for the indigenous Tchefuncte people, who lived in the region more than 2,000 years ago; in the 19th century people here got rich from felling cypress trees, turning them into lumber for a developing New Orleans. Otis House, a Queen Anne-style mansion once belonging to the sawmill baron William Theodore Jay, still stoops at the side of the swamp.

Jones cuts the boat engine as we go down a narrow waterway and points ahead. There’s a pair of bald cypresses; behind them a live oak is swaddled in Spanish moss. “Kya had her bayou cottage here,” he tells me. “There was a dock and it came out in between these two trees.”

The film is a love letter to the landscapes of the Deep South, which are distilled here. Cypress and tupelo trees are knitted into the swamp, bayous running through them like veins. Up high ospreys flutter in the emerald canopy; down below an occasional alligator breaks the lazy water. Eventually the trees beat back and the swamp gives out to pancake-flat marshland rich in roseau cane.

This really is “where the crawdads sing” — the tiny blood-red crustaceans thrive in this fresh, grass-sewn water. But Louisiana’s wetlands are under threat. “They’re disappearing,” Jones says. “We lose part of it every day, so people need to come by and see for themselves now.”

I learn more on an eco-focused Great Delta tour with the science professor and naturalist Peter Yaukey. “Wetlands are some of the most productive ecosystems on Earth, and they’re turning into open water at an alarming rate,” he tells me as we drive on the outskirts of New Orleans, marshes nosing up to its skyline like green velvet.

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Rising sea levels are pushing water further inland, and the increased salinity is killing off flora that needs freshwater to survive. The worst estimates put the rate of loss at an American football field every 45 minutes. It’s worrying stuff — these tracts of vegetation around the city act as a kind of buffer zone during storm surges, and without them New Orleans would be perilously exposed. According to Yaukey, “it’s coastal Louisiana’s biggest environmental problem today”.

We push on. Hulking walls and a Jurassic Park-style gate announce the end of the levee protection. Beyond it are acres of stumpy “ghost forest”, once rich in bald cypress trees, and houses built on 20ft stilts. It’s a different world out here: stark but beautiful, and light years from the warm, pulsing heart of New Orleans, where Bourbon Street screams and Jackson Square fizzes. It’s the final frontier — a reminder of just how precious and fragile the wetland landscapes of Louisiana really are.

There are more enchanting wetlands to be found back on the Northshore — and further reminders of their frailty too. I set up camp in Fontainebleau State Park, where a series of swish, safari-style tents have been installed by Tentrr, and where more dazzling Crawdads locations await.

Here, marshes bleed into forests, which open out onto beaches the colour of champagne. “The landscape changes quickly, which is why there’s so much diversity in the plants and animals,” Stephanie Huber, an interpretive ranger, tells me as we approach the sand. “There are a lot of different ecosystems just in this one park.”

The beaches get progressively wilder as we wander. First there’s a sweep of open sand with families tucked under bright umbrellas, a fishing pier and buckets and spades. Then the band of cypress trees thickens and the sand becomes shaded, plugged with knobbled roots and palmettos. Finally we reach a secluded crescent surrounded on three sides by trees, with nothing to see but sand and water — no sound but the shriek of cicadas. “That’s Kya’s beach,” the director, Newman, had told me. “What Kya saw in the natural world around her was key to understanding her character.”

Scenes of the film were also shot along a forested nature trail in Fontainebleau. The patch is stuffed with native trees and plants: water oaks and sweet gums, yaupon and dog fennel. Dragonflies dart and shells litter the ground. There are fresh tracks — a racoon, Huber reckons.

But — just like in Crawdads — Mother Nature is a predator as well as a friend. In 2021, less than two months after filming wrapped, Hurricane Ida ravaged the park, chewing up the marsh boardwalk and a string of holiday cabins and spitting them out in tattered wrecks. The park is still recovering.

That’s also true of Houma, a dinky city an hour’s drive southwest of New Orleans, but still only a stone’s throw from Louisiana’s feathered coast. Houma stood in for Barkley Cove, the fictional southern town from which Kya is ostracised. “We were drawn to Houma because there was nothing we had to do architecturally to capture the Fifties time period of the movie — the storefronts are still from that same era,” Newman said. “We dressed store windows and we brought in period cars. But if you go to Houma you’ll recognise Barkley Cove.”

Sadly, right now it’s less recognisable than it was. Ida swallowed Houma whole, and it has struggled to bounce back.

There are green shoots, though. Some hotels are welcoming guests again, with more planning to do so early next year. Le Petit Theatre de Terrebonne will throw open its doors again in September. Just off Main Street, the Downtown Jeaux café still sells warm beignets fluffed up beneath pillows of powdered sugar — a favourite with the film crew while they were in town.

Down here Cajun culture runs as deep as the bayou too. Bayou Terrebonne Distillers cooks up corn whiskey and bourbon at the water’s edge, holding regular, rollicking Cajun dance parties called fais-dodos. At down-home roadside joints such as Boudreau & Thibodeau’s Cajun Cookin’ there are étouffée, jambalaya and gator bites on the menu — I’m here at the tail end of crawfish season, when folks gather to boil up pounds of the critters in Cajun spices and eat them straight from a table in a slurping feast.

But even more than that this place is about its people. That inimitable southern hospitality is alive in their bones, and their perpetual dance with Mother Nature has spawned fierce resilience and pride. Way out yonder, where the crawdads sing, existence isn’t easy — but it’s rich and it’s beautiful.

Jacqui Agate was a guest of the Louisiana Office of Tourism (louisianatravel.com). Seven nights’ room only from £1,985pp, including flights and hire car (bon-voyage.co.uk).

The lodge where Baby and Johnny had the time of their lives is in Virginia, but several stirring scenes were shot in Lake Lure, in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in North Carolina. The pretty waterside town milks the connection, with an annual Dirty Dancing festival in which fans attempt to recreate the iconic lake-lift scene. You can also stay overnight at the 1920s-built Lake Lure Inn and Spa, where Patrick Swayze and Jennifer Grey stayed during filming — it has two Dirty Dancing-themed cabins. Details Seven nights’ room only from £1,425pp, including flights and car hire (americaasyoulikeit.com)

If you’re a fan of Forrest Gump, make a beeline for the ultra-charming city of Savannah. You can wander leafy Chippewa Square, where Tom Hanks sat on a bench and made his famed Gump “life is like a box of chocolates” speech — the bench is now in the Savannah History Museum, a ten-minute walk west. Next, set your sights on Atlanta with a short detour to the teensy village of Juliette, the setting for the southern comedy Fried Green Tomatoes. The Georgia state capital is a filming hub, having served as a backdrop for titles as diverse as Driving Miss Daisy, Black Panther and Baby Driver. Details Three nights’ room only in Atlanta and four nights’ B&B in Savannah from £1,949pp, including flights, car hire and film-themed city tours (purelyamerica.co.uk)

Cities such as Birmingham and Montgomery were key to the civil rights movement, and many films shot in the state tell these important stories. There’s Selma (2014), which focuses on the 1965 suffrage marches from Selma to Montgomery and was partly filmed in its namesake — locations include the Edmund Pettus Bridge, site of the “Bloody Sunday” attacks by police on peaceful protesters. Strike east to reach Montgomery, the state capital and primary location for Son of the South (2020), which follows the story of the white civil rights activist Bob Zellner. Details Fourteen nights’ room only from £1,966pp, including flights and car hire (americaasyoulikeit.com)

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