Plymouth is a place where history is both obvious and slightly overstated, and it is better for knowing that in advance. In December 1620 the Mayflower's passengers settled here after a stop on Cape Cod, and the story of the Pilgrims has been told so many times that the real place can seem small beside it. Plymouth Rock, the granite boulder said to mark their landing, sits under a classical portico by the water, and visitors often say it is smaller than they expected, which is fair, since it has been chipped and moved over the centuries and its link to the landing is a tradition rather than a documented fact.
Look further and the town becomes more interesting. A replica of the Mayflower, built in England in the 1950s, is moored by the waterfront, and inside the living-history museum a few miles south you can hear Wampanoag and colonial interpreters explain that the story is a two-sided one. The Wampanoag, who had lived on this coast for thousands of years, had already been devastated by disease brought by earlier European traders, and the Pilgrims settled on a place that had been emptied by an epidemic. That context changes how the whole tale reads. Pilgrim Hall, one of the country's oldest public museums, holds real relics of the settlers, from furniture to Bibles.
The landscape around is a flat, sandy, pine-covered country of ponds and cranberry bogs. In autumn, the bogs are flooded and the berries float in red sheets, a sight that takes you by surprise. The road north along the coast to Duxbury and Marshfield winds past salt marsh and old shingled houses, and the road south, over the Cape Cod Canal, leads onto the Cape itself. The canal, finished in 1914 and wide enough for ocean ships, is crossed by two high bridges, and the path along its banks is popular with walkers and cyclists.
Routes 3 and 3A are the arteries, and in summer they back up badly with beach traffic, so choose your hours. Fuel is available in Kingston and on the main road, and the harbour has a string of seafood places serving chowder, clams and fresh fish. Sea fog can sweep in on spring mornings, and the best light is in autumn, when the crowds thin.