Nearby: The Treasures of Essex

Essex is small, Essex is quaint. Essex is the perfect picture of New England calm, a place in happy union with its natural surroundings, covered by salt marshes and saltboxes. And inside many of those remaining saltboxes are thousands of antiques, some painstakingly curated and others forcibly thrown to exist together. Essex is a quiet place with loud interiors, home to dozens upon dozens of antique shops, each bursting with its own character and the history of its showcased objects. A visitor can spend endless hours strolling from one shop to the next, entering maze upon maze of treasures and tschotskes. It is but an hour's drive-if that-from Boston, and comfortably situated between Ipswich to its north, Hamilton to the west and Gloucester to the southeast. Slowly the picture of the North Shore is becoming clearer to me, as I explore each town on its own basis, appreciating its particular offering one by one. Essex is a place I will eagerly return to, with the knowledge that each time I visit, I will find something new, in the comforting landscape that has not changed much since its beginning.