Welcome to South Shore Hiking Trails!!

This site is for the explorer at heart!!

After years of hiking trails and backpacking, heading to places that sometimes took hours just to get to, the realization came, (partly due to this economy) that exploring your own backyard has many benefits. Those benefits can be very rewarding and lack the expense of those far away trips.

Never met one of these before hiking trails right here on the south shore!

We hope that this will be the residents' as well as the visitors' be all guide to the hiking opportunities of the south shore as well as some expanded recreational opportunities in the surrounding areas.


What this website hopes to bring to you is what makes each trail covered special, the history behind the area, and how it came to be a trail or protected area.


Other features that will be covered and are important to hiking these trails are.....

the seasons and what they offer

tips and safeguards about the trails

Hiking trails of any area offer a visitor the true "feel" of that land visited and go off the beaten trail to those special places that usually only the locals know about.


So, come explore this site, get your hiking boots on, your water bottle filled and let's take a hike on one of the south shore hiking trails.

Using this website

As you will notice on the map below the trails are divided into sectors.

These sectors were created to help organize the trail information and help the viewer to find what they need in an area quicker.

They are not official Massachusetts boundaries.


The south shore like many places in New England, is a place of undefined borders. It can be defined in many ways but truthfully the south shore of Massachusetts is an area. There is no official documentation of which towns are considered to be of the south shore.


Many of the towns that do consider themselves of the south shore, do so as the town will actually border the ocean. Others do so as some of the management agencies of the area include them in their plans of management or development. 

There are other towns that consider themselves on the south shore as they lie inside or east of route 95 & the lower portion of route 495 and of course, all are south of Boston.


The towns listed below are what this website will be covering along with some additional selected areas.

Quite possibly a later expansion to some of those "other" towns that consider themselves of the south shore.

The North West Sector contains the towns Randolph, Braintree, Weymouth, Holbrook shaded in pink.

The North East Sector contains the coastal towns of Hull, Hingham, Cohasset, Scituate shaded in lime green.

The Middle Eastern Sector contains the towns of Norwell, Hanover, Marshfield, Duxbury,Pembroke shaded in blue.

The Middle Western Sector contains the towns of Abington, Rockland, Whitman, Hanson, Halifax shaded in peach.

The Southern Sector contains the towns of Plympton, Kingston, Carver, Plymouth shaded in purple.

getting to the hiking trails on the south shore

On the map below, the route to the right is route 3.

This is the one that leads down to Weymouth, Norwell, Marshfield, Duxbury and Plymouth. The one on the left is route 24.

This route leads down into Randolph.

The connecting route above the two is route 93 south which becomes route 128. This is helpful to get to the Blue Hills Reservation.

Most of the towns of the south shore are accessed by route 3.

Route 3A is in soft yellow to the right of route 3 and the best route for the towns that sit right on the coast.

Most of the directions in the trail quick fact section use route 3 as a starting point for finding the trail head on the page you are viewing.

By clicking on the larger view you can zoom in to see other routes in the towns that will allow you to get to individual trails.