The Cape - especially the island over the bridge - is, you understand, a rock under a thin cover of soil. When the glaciers came through, they picked up a few of the larger specimens of granite and put them on top of that thin soil.

We are talking big and strange-looking rocks here. Like the 25-foot high "Priest Rock" stuck up on top of a barren hill in Dogtown. Or the even taller "Squam Rock" overlooking Annisquam Light. And the profile of Mother Ann looking out from the cliffs near Eastern Point Light.

There are also, in Dogtown's 3,000 acres, rocks that Gloucester's Roger Babson paid to have engraved with Horatio Alger homilies: "Never try, never win," "Work stops; values decay" and "Get a job." And there are rocks that a century ago were picked up and used for the foundations of houses long since vanished.

Twisting their way out of all these rocks are acres of scrub oak, red cedar, white pines.

You can reach miles of trails that wind through Dogtown from Cherry Street, just past Reynard Street, in Riverdale.

Rockport's Halibut Point State Park provides another great place to check out the granite that made Cape Ann famous. For centuries, much stone was quarried and cut in Rockport and Lanesville, then shipped throughout the country for use in many massive building projects.

Halibut Point, off Gott Street, offers trails that wind through granite outcroppings and forest and lead to a rocky, secluded coastline.

Gloucester's Ravenswood Park, off Western Avenue, is home to more paths and granite ledges. The well-marked trails traverse evergreen forest.

And a trip to Dog Bar breakwater, at the tip of Eastern Point, will give you an idea about the solidity of the locally cut granite blocks.

The breakwater is about 1/4-mile long and made up of thousands of granite blocks weighing many tons each. This wall of granite has sheltered Gloucester Harbor for more than a century, withstanding huge seas that have broken over its back during great ocean storms.

Finally, a granite feature hewn by Mother Nature can be seen at Rafe's Chasm, in Magnolia, off Hesperus Avenue. The chasm is made up of a 200-foot-long, 10-foot-wide crack in the solid ledge. Waves funneling ashore create waterspouts when big seas are running. The chasm sits in front of private property, so it's best viewed from a boat.