Six days in Newfoundland: it was its own country until 1949 and has not entirely got over it

Start at the top of the town. The Rooms opened in 2005 on the site of an old fort, takes its name from the wooden sheds where fishing families split and salted their catch, and holds the provincial museum, gallery and archives under one roof with an enormous window over the harbour. The history galleries are the fastest way to understand the island: four centuries of cod, the Beothuk, the regiment almost destroyed at Beaumont-Hamel in 1916, the resettlement of the outports, and the 1949 vote.

Walk down to the basilica, built between 1841 and 1855 out of local stone and Irish granite, and deliberately placed on the ridge so that it would be the first thing a ship saw coming through the gap.

Then keep going downhill to George Street, two short blocks of nothing but bars, which the city claims has more of them per square foot than anywhere else in North America. There is live music in several from early evening, most of it traditional, none of it staged for visitors.

Eat properly first. This is a much better restaurant town than a place of two hundred thousand people has any right to be.

Get on the water in the morning, when the wind is usually lowest. Boats leave the harbour and go out through the Narrows, the gap in the cliffs a couple of hundred metres wide, into the open Atlantic. Two hours gets you humpbacks and minke in summer, icebergs in late spring, gannets and puffins for most of the season, and a sight of the town stacked up its hillside that you cannot get any other way.

In the afternoon go up Signal Hill, the headland on the north side of the gap. The last engagement of the Seven Years' War in North America was fought on it in 1762, and the stone tower on the summit was finished in 1897. In December 1901 Marconi sat in a room below it with an aerial held up by a kite and heard three faint clicks sent from Cornwall, which was the first radio signal ever to cross an ocean.

Take the North Head Trail down. It runs from the tower along the cliff face on a narrow path with chains and cut steps in places, drops about two hundred metres, and comes out in the Battery, a village of houses wedged onto the rock at the harbour mouth. It takes about ninety minutes and it is the best walk in eastern Canada. Do not attempt it in the wet.

A pint and dinner in town afterwards, which you will have earned.

Cross to the south side first. Fort Amherst sits opposite Signal Hill at the harbour mouth, a ten minute drive around the water, and has a lighthouse and the concrete gun emplacements from the second war, when German submarines in these waters were a serious and largely unpublicised problem. The view back at the town from here is the one to photograph.

In the afternoon go round to Quidi Vidi, a working cove on the far side of Signal Hill reached through a slot in the rock barely wide enough for a boat. It is inside the city limits and is a completely separate place: a few dozen houses, fishing stages on the water, galleries in the old plant buildings and a brewery that makes a beer with iceberg water in it. You can walk here from Signal Hill along the shore in half an hour.

Finish underground on Water Street, in the eighteenth century vaults where a Devon merchant house aged port after one of its ships was forced to overwinter here and the cargo improved unexpectedly.

Early night. Tomorrow is a long drive.

About three hundred kilometres and three and a half hours, west along the Trans-Canada and then north up the peninsula. Fill up before the turn-off and take the coastal route in if you have the time, because the road runs through a string of small fishing communities that are the reason people come to this island.

Get to Bonavista in the early afternoon and go straight out to the cape. On 24 June 1497 an Italian navigator sailing for Henry VII made landfall somewhere on this coast and is said to have exclaimed at the happy sight of it, which is where the name comes from. Whether it was this exact headland is disputed and nobody here is much interested in the dispute. The red and white lighthouse on the point dates from 1843, has been restored to how it was in the 1870s, and is the most photographed thing in the province.

Ten minutes back towards town is the Dungeon, a collapsed sea cave in a field of grazing sheep where two arches let the swell in and the water boils around inside a hole in the ground.

Dinner in town. The restaurant scene here is startlingly good for a place this size.

Ten minutes down the coast is Elliston, a village of a few hundred people that calls itself the root cellar capital of the world and has the receipts: over a hundred and thirty turf-covered cellars dug into the hillsides, many of them still in use for potatoes and turnip through the winter.

Its other claim is better. A few hundred metres off the road, a grassy headland looks across a narrow channel at a sea stack covered in nesting Atlantic puffins, and the gap is close enough that the birds fly past at eye level and land within a few metres of you. It is among the closest land-based puffin viewing anywhere. They are there from May to early August. Sit still and wait; do not chase them.

Lunch in the village in an old Orange Lodge, then back into Bonavista for the mercantile history. The Ryan Premises are a group of nineteenth century buildings on the water where the merchant who ran this coast took delivery of salt cod, and the exhibits inside cover five hundred years of the fishery and what happened when it collapsed in 1992.

Finish at the sealers' museum on the way out to the cape, which deals with the seal hunt honestly, including the disaster of 1914 when dozens of men were left on the ice in a blizzard for two nights. It is a hard hour and the right one to end on.

Before you go, spend an hour in the old merchant's house in the middle of town. Mockbegger Plantation was the family home of Newfoundland's first Canadian senator and is kept as it looked in the 1940s: small, personal and much more interesting than that description suggests, because this is what a comfortable outport life actually looked like at the end of the fishery's good years.

Then the drive back. Allow most of the morning to reach St John's for an afternoon flight, or rather longer west to Gander if you are heading that way.

If you have time in hand, the western side of the peninsula is worth the detour, and Trinity, an hour south, is a preserved eighteenth century mercantile village and the prettiest place in the province.