The world’s most famous pond mirrors the sky in a shallow bowl of tree-covered hills just outside Concord, Massachusetts. You can amble the two miles of sandy paths around Walden Pond in a pleasant hour or two, and the time to visit is autumn when the turning leaves glow in the clear green water. Chipmunks forage and squabble over fallen nuts, and ducks paddle past the swimmers, canoes, kayaks and anglers at the pond’s sandy beaches.

Walden Pond is famous because it was here that 27-year-old Henry David Thoreau built himself a shack and lived for two years. He moved in, aptly, on Independence Day 1845. In Walden, his celebrated account of his life by the pond, Thoreau explained: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

He wrote two books, a journal and several essays and cultivated a field of beans. When not entertaining visitors, he walked into Concord to take his laundry home to his mother and to see friends. Chief of these was his mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, whose ideas, outlined in an epoch-making essay, Nature, Thoreau was borrowing and putting into practice.

An inveterate walker, Thoreau was a steadfast champion of Yankee individual freedom; he was also a dizzyingly close observer of the natural world of plants and creatures around his Massachusetts stamping ground, and may fairly be credited as the godfather of the North American environmental movement. He was the original tree-hugger. “The pine,” he observed, “is no more lumber than man is, and to be made into boards and houses is no more its true and highest use than the truest use of a man is to be cut down and made into manure.”

“If you want to see the American soul, you have to look at the mirror of Walden Pond,” as Robert F. Kennedy Jr put it. My wife Annelies and I decided to look. Having practised our thousand-yard stare across Walden Pond – and having pondered a while at the spot where Thoreau’s cabin once stood – we set off in Thoreau’s footsteps. His writings make an engaging and offbeat guide to an attractive side of New England and its spectacular natural beauties. His first (and barely readable) book was A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, so our next expedition was by canoe on the Concord River – having first grabbed takeaway pizzas from Sorrento’s on, naturally, Thoreau Street.

It was peaceful and easy to slip down the broad slow-sliding river. Our canoe glided through the dappled shade and golden carpets of fallen leaves. We saw herons, some kind of fishing eagle and a pair of swimming snakes – not venomous, apparently, but scary looking. We coasted down to the North Bridge, the site of the first armed confrontation in the American War of Independence. Here was fired what Emerson called “the shot heard round the world”.

The historical echoes now were rather drowned by the howl of leaf blowers – you could just feel the global warming. It was so warm, in fact, that autumn had not properly reached Massachusetts in October. According to the fall foliage websites, it was dallying somewhere in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, so we drove north to meet it.

Gradually we trundled north in our SUV to the Kancamagus Highway and on to Bear Notch Road, which winds into the White Mountains and into what can only be called one of the marvels of the natural world. A camera could not do justice to the astonishing colours of the autumn leaves. Forests cascade down whole mountainsides like molten lava, in all the colours of a bush-fire. Thoreau, in a rare stab at understatement, began his essay Autumnal Tints: “Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our autumnal foliage.” You can say that again. Gobsmacking, eyepopping, tongue-lolling stuff.

We went for a gentle hike in the woods, an hour or so each way and a 1,000ft (300m) climb, to Arethusa Falls, near Crawford Notch, about 25 miles (40km) from the Canadian border. Close up you can start to sort out your trees: birch is golden yellow, hickory is a lemony yellow, scarlet oak is deep wine red, sumac is blood orange, and the sugar maple is just off the scale – and its leaves fall with the underside uppermost, a delicate violet that carpets the rocks beneath the trees. Thoreau thought that “Adam in paradise was not so favourably situated as is the backwoodsman in America”.

Strangely enough, being surrounded by forest for several days can get slightly claustrophobic. We decided to follow Thoreau out of the trees to Cape Cod, about which he wrote his most charming book. Cape Cod was also his funniest: according to Emerson, readers laughed until they wept.

Actually, when Thoreau went there, the sandy cape was a bleak and treeless place. He called it “a vast morgue, where famished dogs range in packs – the most uninviting landscape on earth”. We, by contrast, found big luminous skies and ocean horizons. After a sunny afternoon watching the surf thunder on the Coast Guard Beach at Wellfleet, we felt energised and hungry. We had a splendid meal at the Bookstore & Restaurant, but we were so famished that we forgot the first rule for Europeans dining in the US: one starter is generous enough to make a meal for two. The same goes for drinks – we were practically annihilated by our apéritif mojitos.

Our hangovers were vaporised by a cold bright wind the following day when we went to Provincetown to go whale-watching. It is difficult to convey how exciting this is – and after an hour of scanning the heaving blue Atlantic swell and imagining whales everywhere, suddenly there we were, right beside a humpback whale and her calf, ploughing through the water. High-fives all round.

We just had time for a last visit to one of the Cape’s endless crashing beaches. Thoreau, a woodsman and inveterate landlubber, was struck by the ocean, and liked to contemplate its unruly vastness. He enjoyed standing on the beach, gazing east across the Atlantic, because then he was on the edge of another kind of wilderness. “A man may stand there,” he said of the beaches of Cape Cod, “and put all America behind him.”

Need to know
Angus Clarke travelled with Trailfinders (0845 050 5871, www.trailfinders.com), which can tailormake holidays to New England. Boston city breaks start at £449pp, including flights with British Airways and three nights in a three-star hotel. New England fly-drives start at £299pp, including flights with BA and seven days’ car hire.

Further reading:
Walking with Thoreau: A Literary Guide to the Mountains of New England, commentary by William Howarth (Beacon Press, Boston, about £8) ; In the Footsteps of Thoreau: 25 Historic & Nature Walks on Cape Cod, by Adam Gamble (On Cape Publications, about £7.50), both available from www.amazon.co.uk.

Four more writers to follow

Arthur Ransome – Lake District
Swallows and Amazons was inspired by holidays at Bank Ground farm on the eastern shore of Coniston Water in the 1920s. Stay at Bank Ground Farm (015394 41264, www.bankground.com), B&B £42.50pp (children from £22.25pp) or self-catering cottages from £400 a week.

Lawrence Durrell – Corfu
Durrell describes the White House on Corfu in Prospero’s Cell. CV Travel (0870 6060013, www.cvtravel.co.uk) has a week’s self-catering at the White House from £425pp, based on eight sharing, including flights.

Somerset Maugham – Thailand
Stay in the Oriental Hotel in Bangkok, where Maugham wrote The Gentlemen in the Parlour, on a trip retracing his steps. Audley Travel (01993 838100, www.audleytravel.com) can tailormake a 17-day tour through Burma, Thailand and Vietnam, including three nights at the Oriental in Bangkok, from £3,645pp. The cost includes flights, B&B, driver and guide. The Somerset Maugham suite in the Oriental Hotel (00800 2828 3838, www.mandarinoriental.com/bangkok) is from about £540 a night.

Isak Dinesen – Kenya
“I had a farm in Africa at the foot of the Ngong Hills... ” opens the lyrical memoir of Karen Blixen’s life in Kenya between the wars. Today her home is open to visitors. Somak (020-8423 3000, www.somak.co.uk) offers six-night safaris, including a visit to Blixen’s old home, from £1,379pp. Caroline Hendrie

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