Nine days in coastal New England: north until the lobster gets cheaper

Arrive and start walking. The red line painted into the pavement runs two and a half miles from the Common to Charlestown and joins up sixteen historic sites, and following it is the most sensible thing a first-time visitor can do.

Do the first half this afternoon. The Granary Burying Ground is a small yard wedged between office buildings, founded in 1660, with Paul Revere, Samuel Adams, John Hancock and the victims of the Boston Massacre all in it under slate headstones carved with winged skulls.

The Old State House is five minutes east, built in 1713 and the seat of colonial government, with the balcony from which the Declaration of Independence was first read to the city in July 1776. The massacre happened in the road outside and there is a ring of cobbles marking it.

Then Faneuil Hall, built in 1742 as a market with a meeting room above it where the arguments about taxation actually happened. The upstairs hall is free. Have dinner in the North End afterwards, which has been solidly Italian since the 1900s.

The second half of the trail, and the better half, running from the North End over the bridge into Charlestown.

Old North Church is the one that matters. 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. It is still an active parish, the box pews were rented by families and are numbered, and the crypt below holds about a thousand burials.

The burying ground on the hill above it is the second oldest in the city, from 1659, and British gunners used the headstones for target practice during the siege; you can still see the musket damage on some of them.

Then over the bridge 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 crewed by serving sailors. Free to board, with a navy security check, so bring identification.

Finish with the obelisk on the hill above, 294 steps and no lift, commemorating a battle the Americans lost on the next hill along.

Out to the Fenway on the Green line for the art, which is the part of Boston visitors most often skip.

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 among the best outside Japan. Three hours, and choose two departments rather than all of them.

In the afternoon, come back into town for Trinity Church on Copley Square, a Romanesque pile from 1877 that the American Institute of Architects once named among the ten most significant buildings in the country and the only one from that list still standing on it.

Across the square is the public library, the first large free municipal library in America, which looks like a Renaissance palace from outside. Walk up the marble stairs past the lions into the barrel-vaulted reading room at the back. It costs nothing and it is one of the great interiors in the United States.

Collect the car this evening or first thing tomorrow.

A hundred miles and two hours up the interstate, or three on coastal Route 1 through the New Hampshire beaches and the Maine outlet towns. Either way you can be in Portland by lunchtime.

Start with the Old Port, which is about six blocks of brick and granite warehouses rebuilt after the fire that took most of the city on the Fourth of July in 1866. Cobbled streets, chandlers turned into bars, and a working fish pier still operating at the bottom of it, which is what makes this different from every other prettified harbour on the eastern seaboard.

Walk up Munjoy Hill in the afternoon to the observatory, a wooden signal tower from 1807 built so that a retired sea captain could identify incoming ships by their flags and tell the merchants whose cargo was arriving. It is the last one of its kind left in the country, and you climb it.

The Eastern Promenade runs along the crest below it with the whole of Casco Bay and its islands laid out beneath. Walk it at sunset, then eat: this is the reason many people come here at all, and the good rooms take bookings weeks ahead.

A day to slow down before the long drive tomorrow.

Get on the water in the morning. Lobster boats take passengers out for ninety minutes to haul traps, which sounds like a novelty and is the best explanation of the Maine economy you will get; a schooner from the pier does the same bay with sails instead.

In the afternoon, Victoria Mansion is the finest surviving interior of its period in the country: an Italianate villa from 1860 with almost all of its original decoration, frescoed walls, trompe l'oeil ceilings and a stained glass skylight, built as a summer house by a Maine man who made his money running hotels in New Orleans.

The art museum on Congress Square holds Winslow Homer, Andrew Wyeth and a good Impressionist room, and it runs a shuttle out to Homer's studio on the rocks at Prouts Neck, which needs booking.

Then a last dinner in the Old Port and an early night.

A hundred and eighty kilometres, about three hours on the interstate and five if you take coastal Route 1, which threads through Camden and Rockland and is the prettier road. Take Route 1 at least one way.

Arrive in Bar Harbor in the afternoon. It is a small town: two main streets, a green in the middle, wooden hotels from the era when this was a Gilded Age resort, and most of it rebuilt after a fire burned seventeen thousand acres of the island in 1947.

Start at the Abbe Museum, which is devoted to the Wabanaki nations of Maine, is run in partnership with them, and is the only place on this route that tells the story from before the colonists. Ninety minutes.

Then walk the shore path from the green, which runs along the front of the old cottages with Frenchman Bay on your left, and time it for low tide: a gravel bar appears and you can walk out to Bar Island and back. Check the tide table before you start, because the bar floods and people get caught on it every year.

The full day in Acadia, and the loop road is the spine of it: 27 miles round the ocean side of the island, and traffic runs in one direction only.

Start early on the mountain. The summit road up Cadillac needs a vehicle reservation in season and the sunrise slots go instantly; if you have one, this is the highest point on the eastern seaboard and for part of the year the first place in the United States to catch the sun.

Come down and follow the loop road south. Thunder Hole is a chasm in the rock that booms when the swell is right, which is roughly two hours before high tide and not otherwise. Otter Cliff is a hundred feet of pink granite dropping straight into the water. Sand Beach is the only real beach on the island and the sea is about twelve degrees.

In the afternoon go inland to Jordan Pond, a glacial lake with two bare rounded hills at the far end called the Bubbles, one of which has a house-sized boulder balanced on the edge of it that the last ice age left there. The lawn at the pond house has been serving tea and popovers since the 1890s and there is usually a queue.

Finish at the spring at Sieur de Monts, where the wild gardens hold a specimen of every plant community on the island in about an acre.

The last full day, and the choice is between the land and the water.

On land: the carriage roads. Forty-five miles of crushed stone laid out by John D. Rockefeller Jr between 1913 and 1940, with seventeen hand-cut granite bridges, closed to cars and open to bicycles, walkers and horse-drawn carriages. Hire a bike in town and do the loop round Eagle Lake, which is six miles, mostly flat and among the best rides in the eastern United States.

On the water: the four-masted schooner out of the town pier does a two hour sail under canvas, and a separate whale watch boat runs a long way offshore and finds humpbacks and finbacks through the summer.

Do one in the morning and the other in the afternoon if the weather holds, or spend the whole day on the carriage roads.

Last dinner in town, and set an alarm if the sunrise slot came through.

Bangor is an hour away and has an airport with connections through Boston and New York, which is the easy exit. Boston is five hours south on the interstate, which is a long but straightforward day.

Before either, take an hour in town. The historical society has the photographs of what Bar Harbor looked like before the 1947 fire, when there were eighty enormous summer cottages along the shore and the town called itself the wealthiest resort in America. Almost all of them burned.

Then a last walk on the shore path, a coffee, and the road.