Hiking & Walking Trails near Boston

Almost unknown to any but those who live nearby, the 640-acre Breakheart lies along a wild section of the Saugus River, north of Boston. Inside its hardwood forest are two lakes and seven hills, rocky outcrops just over 200 feet in height, but high enough above the woods for views of Boston and southern New Hampshire. Hiking trails circle both lakes, border the river, and form loops throughout the park.

While the south side of Beacon Hill is known for its rows of stately brick homes of Boston's elite old families, the north slope has long been a neighborhood of immigrants, including a sizable African American population that dates to the early 1800s.

This is a walk for birders, history buffs, and anyone who loves flowers, plants, and trees. The idea to create a spacious tree- and flower-filled cemetery was conceived by a Harvard professor of medicine, Dr. Jacob Bigelow, as a solution to a shortage of burial spaces around urban churches.

Boston and Cambridge share the Charles River, which flows in a wide band between them. On each side is a green strip with walking and cycling paths that make good loops, thanks to the well-spaced bridges. The Charles River Reservation is a linear park that stretches 20 miles upriver from Boston Harbor. On the Boston shore, it includes the wide Esplanade, and on the Cambridge side it runs past the scenic campuses of Harvard and MIT. The best view of the Boston skyline is from the MIT shore, with the river as a foreground, dotted with sailboats.

The gentle hills and rocky shorelines of 251-acre World's End, 15 miles from the city on the south shore, has something for everyone: hiking, cross-country skiing, snowshoeing, kayaking, canoeing, birding, horseback riding, and mountain biking. Like the harbor islands, the hills of World's End are drumlins, left by retreating glaciers, which also scraped bare the granite ledges that are now covered in blueberry bushes and cedar.

A scenic two-mile walk along the shore, over rock ledges that slope to the sea, begins just past The Emerson Inn, a beautiful historic hotel overlooking the sea on Cathedral Avenue in Rockport, and continues to Halibut Point State Park. Here, you will find 2.5 miles of trails along more rocky shore and around a granite quarry that has been filled by springs.

One of the country's best-loved city walks, The Freedom Trail follows the events leading up to the American Revolution, visiting the sites where many of the seminal events took place.

The 635-foot summit of Great Blue Hill is the highest of the 22 Blue Hills protected by the 7,000 acres of the reservation stretching across parts of Milton, Quincy, Braintree, Canton, Randolph, and Dedham, south of Boston.

The beautiful level path through forests and riverside wetlands seems far removed from its historic context-the first shots of the American Revolution and Paul Revere's famous ride. Along with sections of the Battle Road, where the British troops were harassed by Minutemen firing from behind stone walls, the trail follows the route of the Minutemen as they moved from their first skirmish with the British troops on Lexington Green to the battle at Concord Bridge.

More than 100 years ago, the preeminent landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted envisioned a long green space connecting downtown Boston to the suburbs. This Emerald Necklace he designed has survived intact, and today connects more than 1,000 acres in six different parks from the Boston Common to Franklin Park.