I learned, of course, the best eating places, and that was not hard because dining choices on the Northern Neck are few. There is Angelo’s Pizza in Montross, great for pizza, of course, but also for some of the finest crab cakes in a region where crab is a staple and almost cheaper than hot dogs. And there is the Car Wash Cafe, where you can indeed wash your car or else sit down to a crab meat omelet with grits that many I talked to judged better than Grandma’s. There are some fancy spots, of course, but why bother with trumped-up fine dining when you can stop at River Market in White Stone for fresh melon soup (in season) or she-crab bisque year round? True, you can sit on the dock at the historic Tides Inn, savoring grilled oysters alongside Beltway types on golf holidays. Far better, for my money, to brave the grouchy deli counter women at the Tri-Star supermarket in Kilmarnock, who make succulent and peppery fried chicken that I took to eating, napkins tucked into my collar, in the seat of the car.

On my October visit I picked up a box of mixed pieces, light meat and dark, from the Tri-Star and drove north from Kilmarnock to Montross, returning to Stratford Hall for another look around.

The place had gotten under my skin, and at moments of worry I can cast my mind back to a tour I took of the plantation with the farm manager, Thomas Moles. Mr. Moles, who is in his 60s, has managed Stratford Hall for the last three decades and somehow still maintains the nearly 2,000-acre plantation with a three-person staff that includes Bonnie, his wife.

With a weather-grooved face, half an index finger missing from his left hand and political views I sidestepped, Mr. Moles was, it struck me, like so much else on the Northern Neck: an endangered commodity. By this I mean a country man.

“Worser than ever,” he said in a regional accent that is all suppressed consonants and rug-muffled vowels. Citified people were infiltrating the Neck, he said when I asked about things in the area, people who know nothing about farming or when a field needs liming or what to do when a cow throws a breech calf or how to feel a horse’s fetlock for heat to see if it is coming up lame.

I spotted few city devils myself, though there was one young woman with a telltale pierced septum.

Generally I saw few people at all.

On that day in Mr. Moles’s truck, I passed fallow hayfields, cutting into the plantation from its southern corner to rattle through fields where an apiarist had established a little metropolis of white-painted hives. Our destination was the Stratford Hall cliffs, tawny and fragile, a geological wonder: fluted stone curtains striped with deposits of sedimentary strata that form the remaining bed of an ancient sea.