The Bay Circuit Trail or Bay Circuit is a Massachusetts recreational trail which, when complete, will form an arc through the outlying suburbs of Boston from Plum Island in Newburyport to Kingston Bay in Duxbury, a distance of 200 miles (320 km). 150 miles (240 km) of the trail were complete as of 2007. The trail, first proposed in 1929 and imagined as an outlying version of Boston's Emerald Necklace trail, spans fifty towns and cities and four counties.
The trail links together conservation land, nature sanctuaries, national historic parks, state parks, and other public green space. The diverse topography of the trail includes beaches, cranberry bogs, salt marshes, woodlands, cliffs, drumlins, lakes and reservoirs, river corridors, swamps, historic sites and ruins, museums, farmland, meadows, kettle ponds, and eskers. Highlights include Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond, Great Meadows National Wildlife Refuge, the Charles River, Massachusetts Audubon's Moose Hill Wildlife Sanctuary, Minute Man National Historical Park, Lowell National Historic Park, the Merrimack River, and Plum Island.
Portions of the Bay Circuit Trail coincide with other long distance recreation trails including the East Coast Greenway, the Warner Trail, and the Minuteman Bikeway, (providing a potential connection to Downtown Boston via the Somerville Community Path). The Bay Circuit is open to hiking, picnicking, and in the winter, snowshoeing. Certain parts of the trail are suitable for bicycling and cross country skiing. Swimming, mountain biking, hunting, fishing, and car top boating are also permitted in some properties the trail passes through. The Bay Circuit Trail is managed by the Bay Circuit Alliance, a confederacy of state, town, and federal agencies, non-profit organizations, and individuals.
Read more about Bay Circuit Trail: Geography
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—Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889)
“We are all hostages, and we are all terrorists. This circuit has replaced that other one of masters and slaves, the dominating and the dominated, the exploiters and the exploited.... It is worse than the one it replaces, but at least it liberates us from liberal nostalgia and the ruses of history.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
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—Anne Roiphe (20th century)