Drive down Old Towne Road toward Charles Towne Landing and you'll pass a stretch of live oaks and open field that, until this summer, sat behind a closed gate. For most of the past decade, the only way onto that land was an occasional low-impact event, a Wine Down Wednesday here and there, nothing that let a resident just show up on a Tuesday morning and walk it. On June 30, that changed. Old Towne Creek County Park opened to the public, and the land that had been visible from the road for years finally became a place you could enter.
That alone would be worth a mention. But the timing matters more than the ribbon cutting suggests, because West Ashley's outdoor footprint is changing on two fronts at once this year, and neither change makes much sense without the other. One is a park that took fifteen years to move from purchase to public access. The other is a bridge, still under construction a few miles east, that is about to give the neighborhood's long-running trail system something it has never had: an actual destination on the other end.
A park that sat behind a gate for a decade and a half
Charleston County Parks and Recreation bought the 67-acre property from the Lowcountry Land Trust in 2011, the year Emily Ravenel Farrow died. Farrow and her mother, Emily Simmons Ravenel, had owned the land for decades, running it first as a farm and later as the home of Miss Em's St. Andrews Riding Academy. Farrow had placed a conservation easement on the property years earlier specifically to keep it from being developed, and when CCPRC took ownership, the plan was always public access. It just took a long time to get there. Public input on the master plan was gathered in 2017. Construction didn't break ground until April 2023. The gates opened this past June.
What's on the other side of that fifteen-year gap is a genuinely different kind of park from anything else nearby. Trails and boardwalks wind through open fields and stands of live oak toward views of Old Towne Creek and the surrounding salt marsh. There's an arboretum built from ornamentals the Ravenel and Farrow women planted themselves over the decades. A nature-inspired playground sits near the historic buildings, and the property's Main House and Caretaker's House were added to the National Register of Historic Places this year for their architecture and setting. Charleston County Parks describes the site simply as a welcoming space to connect with the landscape and history of West Ashley.
Why this doesn't feel like the park next door
Old Towne Creek County Park shares a fence line with Charles Towne Landing, and from the road the two properties read as one continuous forest. They are not telling the same story. Charles Towne Landing centers on the original 1670 settlement of the Carolina colony. Old Towne Creek is doing something else, using its trails and interpretive signage to explain how a rural St. Andrews Parish farm turned into the West Ashley most residents know today, the bridge crossings, the postwar growth, the shift from country to suburb.
That distinction has a practical side too. The two parks operate separately, with different admission structures and different hours, so a visit to one doesn't automatically include the other even though they sit side by side. If you're planning to walk both in a single outing, check each site's schedule before you go rather than assuming shared hours.
The numbers that matter if you're walking in this week
Old Towne Creek's operating hours are worth noting right now, because they're about to shift. Charleston County Parks set summer hours of 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. through the end of August. Starting in September, the park moves to an 8 a.m. to sunset schedule that holds through April.
A few other practical details:
- Admission is $2 per person, with free entry for Gold Pass members and children age 2 and under.
- The park is located at 1400 Old Towne Road, directly adjacent to Charles Towne Landing State Historic Site.
- Trails include boardwalks and marsh overlooks, and the site is open daily.
None of that is complicated, but it's the kind of detail that changes what a Saturday morning actually looks like for a household half a mile away.
The other half of the story: a bridge that finally gives the Greenway somewhere to go
West Ashley has had a real trail network for years. The West Ashley Greenway currently runs close to nine miles along a former rail corridor, connecting to the shorter West Ashley Bikeway spur near St. Andrews Boulevard. It's a genuinely good amenity, wide, mostly paved, shaded in long stretches, with marsh views toward the eastern end. But it has always functioned as an out-and-back. It doesn't currently connect West Ashley to the downtown peninsula, which means a resident who wants to bike from a Greenway-adjacent neighborhood to King Street or the Medical District still has to get in a car and cross one of the two vehicular Ashley River bridges, both of which carry more than 63,000 cars a day on narrow sidewalks not built for foot or bike traffic.
The Ashley River Crossing is the project meant to close that gap. It's a standalone pedestrian and bicycle bridge, budgeted at roughly $74 million, that will link the Greenway directly to Brittlebank Park and the Ashley River Walk on the peninsula side, with a protected connection into the Medical District near Lockwood Drive and Bee Street. When it opens, engineering trade press has described it as the first cable-stayed movable swing bridge built in the United States, a bobtail span designed to let boat traffic pass while keeping pedestrians and cyclists separated from the marine channel.
Construction has been underway since January 2025, and progress reports through late 2025 and early 2026 show real movement. As of November 2025, crews had installed roughly 1,600 linear feet of the span from the river's edge nearly to the landing point, with the marsh-crossing surface work visible from the existing vehicular bridge. In February 2026, Charleston City Council approved another $437,500 to finalize the design of the downtown landing, and city officials have confirmed the project remains on track for a mid-2027 completion.
This isn't a small-audience improvement. Nearly half of Charleston's population lives in West Ashley, and right now almost none of that population has a safe way to walk or bike to the job centers on the other side of the river. The city's own project page frames the bridge as the missing link between the Greenway, Brittlebank Park, and the Ashley River Walk, three pieces of trail that have existed independently for years and are about to function as one system.
What actually changes for a Saturday morning
Put the two projects next to each other and the pattern gets clearer than either one on its own. Within the same twelve months, West Ashley gained a second walkable landscape a few hundred yards from a park families already knew, and watched real construction progress on a bridge that will eventually let the neighborhood's main trail lead somewhere other than back to the parking lot it started from. Neither project alone rewrites daily life here. Together, they mark the point where West Ashley's trails stop being a set of separate loops and start becoming a network with an actual destination on the far end.
If you haven't walked Old Towne Creek yet, today is the last day of the extended 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. summer schedule. Starting tomorrow, the park shifts to sunset closings, which in West Ashley this time of year still leaves plenty of daylight for an evening loop past the marsh.
If you're weighing what a neighborhood like this means for your own next move, whether that's a first home in West Ashley or a next one nearby, the Farrah & Marisa Team knows this corridor block by block, from Avondale to the Greenway to the new park gates on Old Towne Road. Let's Connect whenever the timing feels right.
