Myles Standish, the military man of the Pilgrim colony, retired to Duxbury, and so did John Alden and Priscilla Mullins, the couple Longfellow made famous in a long poem. The town was settled in the 1620s by Plymouth colonists who wanted more land than Plymouth would give them, and it still has a look of settled, well-kept age, with colonial houses along tree-lined streets and a long waterfront on a sheltered bay. A granite monument tower, put up in the nineteenth century to honour Standish, rises above the woods on Captain's Hill, and on a clear day it gives a long view over the bay and the coast.
The bay is the thing. Duxbury Bay is a wide, shallow, tidal bay protected by a long barrier beach, Duxbury Beach, which runs for several miles of sand and dune from the town to Gurnet Point, with a lighthouse at the end. The bay is a famous place for oysters, and the local shellfish are still prized on menus around Boston. Sailboats fill the bay in summer, and a wooden bridge, Powder Point Bridge, one of the longest of its kind in the country, crosses to the beach and has been a landmark for well over a century. The beach is a nesting site for piping plovers, so there are seasonal restrictions on parts of it.
The roads around Duxbury are leafy, narrow and pleasant, a mix of residential streets and country lanes that lead out toward the marshes and the coast. They are not dramatic, but they have a gentle charm, particularly in autumn and spring, and they link well with the coast roads of the South Shore on the way to Plymouth and Kingston. Watch for cyclists and for sand on the roads near the beach, and keep to the low limits in the village streets. In summer, beach traffic can be heavy, and parking is restricted for non-residents.
Kingston, seven kilometres away, is the nearest bigger town, with fuel and a train station, and Plymouth, a little further, is a full-scale tourist town with a replica of the Mayflower, Plymouth Rock and a good many fried-clam restaurants. Duxbury itself has a handful of shops, a bakery or two and a few places to eat in the village, but little fuel. An early morning in May or September, with a thin mist on the bay and the boats still, is the best time to see the place.