Crossings Park

Crossings Park is where Hilton Head plays rather than where it poses. Seventy-four acres off Arrow Road and Helmsman Way on the south end, mostly wooded, built around a three-field youth baseball complex and lighted soccer fields, with a playground, a picnic pavilion, a batting cage, a concessions building, restrooms and free parking. The town bought the land in the early 1990s for what became its first purpose-built recreation facility, and the island's youth leagues have been running on it ever since.

That history matters for a visitor's expectations. This is a community sports park, and on a Saturday in spring it is entirely given over to children's baseball and soccer, with the car park full and the concessions window open. It is a good scene, and if you have a kid who plays, the Island Recreation Association runs programmes and camps out of here that visiting families can sometimes join. It is not a place you go to look at the Lowcountry.

The other half of the property is the reason it belongs on a list of island parks at all. Most of those 74 acres are woodland, and interpretive trails run through it from the edge of the playing fields into pine and mixed hardwood, past a grass meadow, with almost no one on them midweek. It is shade in July, which on a barrier island in the middle of summer is a genuine amenity, and it is a place to walk that is not a beach and not a road.

Set your expectations accordingly. If you want wildlife, Pinckney Island and Jarvis Creek do it better. If you want plants explained, Newhall does. What Crossings does, better than anywhere else on the south end, is give you free parking, real restrooms, a decent playground and a quiet shaded walk within five minutes of Coligny — which on a hot afternoon with restless children is worth more than another preserve.