American Fiction|Peggotty Beach, Scituate — Where the Family Finally Faces the Water

Peggotty Beach is the second Scituate location, and the more public one. It sits just south of the harbour mouth at the end of Peggotty Beach Road, a long shallow crescent backed by a stone seawall and a tight colony of small cottages that get boarded and unboarded with the seasons. There is a small town lot, a ramp over the wall, and then sand that runs flat and hard at low tide.

The production shot here across August and September 2022, using the beach for the shoreline the film calls Martha's Vineyard. It works because the geography agrees. Look north from the sand and Scituate Light stands across the harbour entrance on Cedar Point, white tower, granite base, the same view that has been sold as New England for two hundred years. Look the other way and there is nothing but water to Provincetown. A film about a man who resents being flattened into a type had to be shot somewhere that resists flattening, and this beach does — it is a working shoreline, not a resort, with lobster gear stacked against the wall and gulls arguing over it.

Go at low tide and walk out toward the bar. The wind comes straight off the open Atlantic and it will take the top off any sentence you try to say. That is the honest version of the beach the film borrowed, and it is free to stand on.

Photo: Scituate Lighthouse, Cedar Point, Massachusetts (Pexels, free licence) — the landmark visible north across the harbour from Peggotty Beach.