BARBADOS, small though it is, once had more than 500 mills designed purely to crush sugar cane. Only one now remains: Morgan Lewis.

The beautiful Caribbean island is well known for sun and sand; its Platinum west coast is famously frequented by the beautiful people. What is less well known is how the island’s history is interwoven with the story of sugar. By leaving the beach for a few days, it’s possible to follow this bittersweet trail of sugar and slavery and discover what made Barbados the country it is today.

Morgan Lewis mill is on the sparsely populated east coast. Back in 1751, when the mill was built, it would have taken ten men to turn the sail, crushing the sugar cane stems to produce syrupy sap, which was then boiled until the sugar crystallised out.

Wealthy English aristocrats were tempted into making easy money from sugar, though few chose to live in the colonies. Today only a handful of their opulent mansions remains. Jacobean St Nicholas Abbey, complete with an English knot garden, was built in 1650, less than 25 years after the English seized Barbados and around the time they had decided that sugar was to be their main cash crop.

Like many other wealthy plantations, it had its own windmill for crushing the sugar cane, and a factory for boiling sugar cane juice to extract unrefined muscovado sugar.

Only the ruins of these buildings remain. The house feels dark because it is hemmed in by mahogany trees, grown to house the descendants of the plantation, and because the house, the factory and windmill still exist in a charmed circle, surrounded by 220 acres of sugar cane.

At the Abbey, the highlight is to sit in the stables and watch a black and white film shot in 1935 by plantation owner Laurence Cave, but discovered only 45 years later by his grandson. These ten precious reels document the final days of non-automated sugar production. They depict a windmill made of coral with canvas sails that small Barbadian boys climbed aboard for a hair-raising rollercoaster ride as the internal wooden cogs crushed sticks of sugar cane to extract its dark syrup.

I visited Barbados as part of my research for a book I was writing on sugar: I was fascinated by the ubiquity of sugar in our diets and wanted to retrace its history and find out why it had become so important. The story is a cruel one and involved the enslavement of between 14 and 21 million Africans.

On Barbados, I found that, as well as the plantation houses, replica slave “chattel houses” have been conserved, at Tyrol Cot. A stark contrast to the opulence of the colonial houses, the slaves had rough mud huts thatched with sugar cane leaves. At the beginning of the 1800s their houses were hewn of coral; none was larger than three by two-and-a-half metres (10 x 8ft), yet several slaves were expected to share one of these stone huts.

The island’s dark past has thus created a vibrant culture, if a slightly uneasy racial mix.

Sugar: The Grass that Changed the World by Sanjida O’Connell (Virgin Books, £20).

Need to know

Getting there: Sanjida O’Connell travelled with American Airlines (020-7365 0777, www.aa.com), which has flights from Heathrow to Barbados via Miami from £524. Staying there: Roman Beach Apartments, Oistins (001 246 428 7635, www.romanbeach.com) from £24 a night. Little Arches Hotel (420 4689, www.littlearches.com), £120. Further information: St Nicholas Abbey (422 8725). Morgan Lewis Mill: contact the Barbados National Trust (426 2421). Tyrol Cot Heritage Village (424 2074).

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