Essex is a tiny town built on mud and marsh, and it has been building boats for more than three hundred and fifty years. It sits in the Great Marsh of Cape Ann, with the Essex River winding through tidal grass to the sea, and its shipyards launched hundreds of wooden fishing schooners, many of them for the Gloucester fleet just up the coast, using local oak and pine. Today it has a shipbuilding museum, a causeway lined with antique shops and clam shacks, and about fifteen hundred residents, plus a lot of weekend visitors. Manchester-by-the-Sea, a larger neighbour of about five thousand people, lies a few kilometres away.
The riding around it is gentle New England coastal roads. Route 133 runs through the village between the marshes and the woods, with low stone walls, white clapboard houses and old trees, and the road is narrow, with tight corners, little shoulder and plenty of traffic on summer weekends, especially near the clam shacks. On the quieter back roads toward Gloucester and Ipswich, the surface can be patched and rough, with frost heaves in late winter. Early morning and weekdays are best. In autumn, the maples turn flame red along the marsh edge, and the roads are lovely if busy with leaf-peepers. Fuel is available in town and in nearby Gloucester and Manchester.
The town is famous for another reason: fried clams. A local restaurant on the causeway claims to have invented the dish in 1916, when its founder dropped clams in a fryer on a whim, and the claim is cheerfully defended by locals and rival cooks alike. Whether or not it is true, there is no doubt the clams are very good, served in a basket with tartar sauce, and the lines can be long on a sunny weekend. The antique shops along the main road, in old barns and houses, sell everything from ship models to ironwork.
The marsh is the star of the landscape, a wide plain of salt hay and creeks that changes colour through the seasons, green in summer, gold in autumn and silver in winter. It is a rich habitat for herons, egrets, ospreys and migrating shorebirds, and at high tide the water floods the grass and mirrors the sky. The air smells of salt, mud and fried seafood, a combination that is hard to beat.
Bring a light jacket for the sea breeze, and be careful on the sandy shoulders. Fill up on the way in, since stations in the village are few. Finish with a basket of clams on the causeway, and watch the tide come in.