Betty's Hope

Two stone windmill towers stand over the fields south of Pares, and one of them has its sails back on. This was Antigua's first large sugar plantation, founded in the 1650s and owned by the Codrington family from 1674 until 1944, worked by enslaved Africans (393 of them in 1680). The restored mill still has its crushing machinery, but it turns only for occasional demonstrations because the old walls are fragile.

Around it are the ruins of the Great House, the boiling house where sixteen copper vessels reduced cane juice to sugar, a roofless still house with arches where rum was made, and the cisterns behind the house. A small visitor centre in an old cotton store has estate plans, maps, artefacts and a model of the site. The Museum of Antigua and Barbuda runs it as an open-air museum, and entry is paid.