Cape Cod Attractions

Start with Highland Light in Truro, the oldest light station on the Cape. The current 66-foot brick tower dates from 1857 and stands on the highest ground on the outer shore, which is exactly why it was sited there and exactly why it had to be rescued: the clay scarp beneath it retreats by a few feet in a typical year and faster in a bad one. In July 1996 it was jacked up and pushed 450 feet west over eighteen days. It now sits beside a golf course, which is an odd juxtaposition until you realise the golf course was simply the only flat land available.

Nauset Light in Eastham is the compact red-and-white cast-iron tower everyone photographs. Its history is a Cape history in miniature. Built in 1877, it was originally one of the two towers at Chatham; when Chatham went down to a single light, this one was barged and hauled north to Eastham in 1923 to replace three brick towers known as the Three Sisters, whose surviving shells now stand in the woods a short walk inland. The red upper half arrived in the 1940s as a daymark. In November 1996 the whole thing went 336 feet back from the cliff, and it was relit on 10 May 1997. The National Park Service owns it and a local preservation society runs it.

Chatham Lighthouse looks out over the most volatile water on the Cape, where the barrier beach in front of the town has broken open and resealed repeatedly within living memory. The overlook opposite is the best free view at the elbow.

Nobska Light at Woods Hole and the three towers at Nauset complete a very good day's driving if towers are your thing. Whether any given light is open to climb depends on the season and on volunteers, so check rather than travelling for it.

The Pilgrim Monument is the tallest all-granite structure in the United States at 252 feet and seven and a half inches, and it is the strangest thing on the Cape skyline: an Italian campanile, modelled on the Torre del Mangia in Siena, standing over a New England fishing town. Theodore Roosevelt laid the cornerstone in August 1907 and William Taft dedicated it in August 1910. It commemorates the Mayflower's actual first landfall in the New World: the ship anchored in Provincetown Harbor in November 1620 and the Compact was signed aboard her here, more than a month before the company settled at Plymouth. You climb it by interior ramps rather than stairs, which makes it manageable for children and for anyone whose knees have opinions, and the view takes in the whole hook back toward the mainland.

MacMillan Pier is where the town's working life and its visitor economy meet on the same planks. Whale-watch boats, the Boston fast ferry, sport fishing charters, the Long Point shuttle and the commercial fleet all use it, and simply standing on it for twenty minutes tells you more about Provincetown than any exhibit.

Commercial Street was laid out in 1835 at twenty-two feet wide and has never been widened, which is why it functions as a pedestrian corridor with cars apologetically threading through it. Galleries, the art association and museum founded in 1914, the Fine Arts Work Center from 1968, drag houses, tackle shops and bakeries sit within a few hundred yards of each other. The art colony dates to 1898, when Charles Hawthorne opened his school here and painters discovered the light at the end of the Cape.

Park once, or better, do not bring a car at all.

Chatham Fish Pier is the one nobody expects to enjoy as much as they do. Day boats come in through the cut in the afternoon, the catch goes up a conveyor into the packing house, and an observation deck built over the unloading area lets you watch the whole business from above at no cost. Grey seals lie about in the water below waiting for what falls in, which is also the reason the sharks are around the corner. Timings depend on the boats and the weather, so treat it as a place to drop into rather than an appointment.

The Cape Cod Canal cuts across the shoulder of the peninsula where a portage route had existed since the seventeenth century. It opened in 1914 as a private venture, the federal government bought it in 1928, and the Army Corps of Engineers has run it toll-free ever since. It is 7.4 miles long, 480 feet wide and 32 feet deep at mean low water, and the service roads on both banks are flat, car-free and open year round. Traffic through it is genuinely large — tankers, container ships, tugs and tows — and it passes close enough that you stop mid-conversation.

Woods Hole, at the bottom corner of Falmouth, is a village of a few streets that happens to contain two of the most important marine research institutions in the world, plus a small federal aquarium that is among the oldest in the country. The drawbridge goes up, the Vineyard ferry comes and goes, and scientists queue for coffee behind you.

Rock Harbor in Orleans empties completely at low tide, leaving the charter fleet sitting on the mud, and the channel out into the bay is marked by a line of pine trees stuck into the sand flats. Sunset here is a local institution.

Heritage Museums and Gardens in Sandwich is the largest cultural attraction on the Cape: around a hundred acres of grounds famous for rhododendrons in late spring, an American automobile collection housed in a round barn, changing galleries, a working antique carousel and a canopy walk through the trees. It is the strongest wet-weather option on the Upper Cape and a genuinely good half day in fine weather too.

The JFK Hyannis Museum on Main Street covers the Kennedy family's long association with Hyannis Port through photographs and film rather than artefacts, which suits the subject. The family compound itself is private, not open, and not visible from any public road, so do not plan a drive-by. Nearby, a quiet memorial overlooks the harbour.

The Sandwich Glass Museum tells the story of the Boston and Sandwich Glass Company, which ran through much of the nineteenth century and made this the Cape's one genuine industrial town. Live glassblowing demonstrations are the reason to go rather than the cases.

The Cape Cod Museum of Natural History in Brewster is small, thoughtful and perfectly placed: its own trail runs from the back door out across the marsh to the Brewster flats, so you can learn what a tidal flat does and then walk onto one.

The Whydah Pirate Museum in West Yarmouth is built around a real wreck — a slave ship turned pirate flagship that went down off Wellfleet in a storm in 1717 and was located in the 1980s. Conservation work on recovered material happens on site.

Hours at all of these shift with the season and several close or reduce sharply in winter. Check before you drive.

Monomoy National Wildlife Refuge, established in 1944 and running to about 7,604 acres, hangs south from Chatham as a pair of sandy barrier islands with a designated wilderness area on them. The Morris Island unit is reachable on foot from Chatham with a short interpretive trail and a viewpoint over the flats. North and South Monomoy are boat access only through permitted operators, and they hold one of the largest grey seal concentrations on the east coast plus enormous numbers of migrating shorebirds. The shoals here move constantly and are not a place to take an unfamiliar boat.

Nickerson State Park in Brewster is the Cape's inland counterweight: nearly two thousand acres of pitch pine and oak around a group of deep, clear kettle ponds left by melting glacial ice. Cliff Pond and Flax Pond are swimmable and freshwater, the camping is the most popular on the peninsula, and the Rail Trail runs straight past the gate.

Great Island in Wellfleet is the best long walk on the Cape and the least forgiving: a loop of several miles out onto a former island now joined to the mainland by a sand spit, across tidal flats where an eighteenth-century tavern site has been excavated. There is no shade, no water and no shortcut, and parts of the route are impassable at high tide. Take the tide table seriously.

Sandy Neck in Barnstable is a six-mile barrier beach with a marsh behind it and a scattering of old dune cottages at the far end.

First Encounter Beach in Eastham is where a Mayflower scouting party and a group of Nauset people exchanged arrows and shot in December 1620, five weeks before Plymouth. It is now one of the best sunsets on the bay.

On the bluff above Marconi Beach in Wellfleet, a set of interpretive panels and a model stand on an otherwise empty patch of heath. This is where Guglielmo Marconi built a wireless station with four 210-foot wooden towers, and in January 1903 sent the first transatlantic wireless message originating in the United States, an exchange of greetings between President Roosevelt and King Edward VII. The station later carried the first news of the Titanic's distress calls to reach American shores.

Almost nothing of it survives. The cliff has eroded so far that parts of the site are now in the sea, and concrete anchor blocks occasionally reappear on the beach below. That absence is the point: this is the single best place on the Cape to understand how fast the outer shore is going. Stand at the fence, look at where the towers were, and look at where the edge is.

A short walk from the same car park, the Atlantic White Cedar Swamp Trail drops off the heath on a boardwalk into a sunken cedar swamp that feels like a different climate zone entirely. It is about a mile and a quarter, mostly easy, and one of the most surprising short walks in the park.

The bluff is also an object lesson in why the fencing matters. The scarp face here is close to vertical, undercut in places, and it collapses without warning. Stay well back from the lip, and do not be the person on the sand at the foot of it looking for a photograph.