Cape Ann · MA-127 & 133

The Cape Ann coast on MA-127: it leaves Beverly by Hale Street and Prides Crossing, passes Manchester-by-the-Sea and Magnolia, runs along the water past Hammond Castle and the Gloucester fisherman's memorial, follows 127A to Rockport and Halibut Point and comes back through Annisquam, Essex and Ipswich. It's 40 miles of rocky shore, harbors and salt marsh. Have fried clams in Essex. Summer and fall traffic is heavy in Gloucester and Rockport, so start early.

Cape Ann was settled from the sea, and Gloucester counts its fishing history from 1623. On Stacy Boulevard stands the Fisherman's Memorial, the Man at the Wheel by Leonard Craske, unveiled in 1925, and around it plaques carry the names of the city's fishermen lost at sea, a list that still grows. A few miles back, Hammond Castle was built between 1926 and 1929 by the inventor John Hays Hammond Jr. as his home and radio laboratory; it faces Norman's Woe, the reef behind Longfellow's "The Wreck of the Hesperus", and it is a museum with its own parking lot.

At the top of the cape, Halibut Point State Park is built around the old Babson Farm granite quarry, and on a clear day you can see the coast of Maine and the Isles of Shoals; parking is paid from late May to mid-October. The way back crosses the Annisquam River on a short stretch of MA-128 and drops into Essex, a village that built more two-masted wooden fishing schooners than any other place, with a shipbuilding museum on Main Street. Right there is Woodman's, the clam shack Chubby and Bessie Woodman opened in 1914, where by local tradition the first fried clams were served in 1916.