Four days in Boston: a revolution you can walk in an afternoon

Start where the red line starts, on the Common, which has been public ground since 1634 and was a cow pasture and a militia field before it was a park. Walk up the hill on its north side.

The State House is at the top with a gold dome on it that was covered in copper by Paul Revere and later gilded, and it is where Massachusetts still governs itself. Free tours run on weekdays and take about forty minutes; the building is a Bulfinch and the first proper piece of American public architecture.

Come back down to Tremont Street for the Granary Burying Ground, which is the strangest thing on this walk. It is a small yard wedged between buildings, founded in 1660, and Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock and the victims of the Boston Massacre are all in it. Slate headstones with winged skulls, and office workers eating lunch on the wall.

Then follow the line down to Faneuil Hall, built in 1742 as a market with a meeting room above it, where the arguments about taxation that led to the Revolution were actually had. The market halls behind it are now a food court and a busking pitch, which is either lively or a shame depending on your mood, and the upstairs hall is still free and still worth seeing.

The second half of the trail, and the better half. It runs from the North End over the bridge into Charlestown, is about two miles, and can be walked back along the harbour.

Start at the Paul Revere House, which is the oldest building in downtown Boston, put up around the 1680s and lived in by Revere for thirty years. It takes twenty minutes and is worth it mostly for the shock of the scale: low ceilings, small rooms, a silversmith with sixteen children.

Five minutes north is Old North Church, and this is the one. On the night of 18 April 1775 the sexton climbed the steeple and hung two lanterns for about a minute, signalling that the regulars were crossing the Charles by water rather than marching out over the neck. The church is still an active Episcopal parish, the box pews were rented by families and are numbered, and the crypt below holds around a thousand burials.

Then over the bridge into Charlestown for the USS Constitution, launched in 1797, nicknamed Old Ironsides after British shot bounced off her live oak hull in 1812, and still a commissioned ship of the navy crewed by serving sailors. Boarding is free, you need photo identification, and there is a separate museum on the pier that fills in the rest.

The obelisk on the hill above is worth the last twenty minutes if the legs are willing. Two hundred and ninety-four steps, no lift, and a view over the harbour at the top.

Out to the Fenway on the Green line for the art, which is the part of Boston visitors most often skip and should not.

The Museum of Fine Arts is one of the largest in the country and its strengths are specific: French Impressionists, Egyptian and classical antiquities from its own excavations, and a Japanese collection that is among the best outside Japan. Three hours, and go for two departments rather than all of them.

Ten minutes' walk away is the opposite kind of museum. Isabella Stewart Gardner built a Venetian palazzo round a glass-roofed courtyard, filled it with what she liked, and left it on condition that nothing be moved, so the arrangement you see is hers. The empty frames on the wall of the Dutch room are where the paintings taken in the 1990 theft hung, and they have been left empty deliberately. Anyone named Isabella gets in free, permanently.

Come back into town in the late afternoon for the Boston Public Library, which was the first large free municipal library in the country and looks like a Renaissance palace on the outside. Walk through the entrance hall, up the marble staircase and into the vast reading room at the back. It costs nothing and takes fifteen minutes and it is one of the great interiors in the United States.

The last morning is Cambridge, which is a separate city with its own government and about ten minutes away on the Red line. Get out at Harvard Square.

Harvard Yard is straight through the gates and open to walk into. The oldest buildings around it go back to the 1720s, the freshman dormitories are still in it, and the statue of John Harvard in the middle carries three separate untruths on its plinth, which the students will tell you about with enthusiasm.

Then pick one museum. The natural history collection holds the Blaschka glass flowers, three thousand botanical models made in glass by a father and son in Dresden over fifty years, which sounds dull and is genuinely astonishing in the room. The art museums up the street have a Renzo Piano roof and a study collection you can ask to see.

Then Logan: about half an hour from Harvard on the Red line and the Silver Line bus, or twenty minutes in a taxi through the tunnel when it is clear.