VERMONT comes closer than any New England state to realising the quintessential image of small-town Yankee America, with its white churches and red barns, covered bridges and clapboard houses, snowy woods and maple syrup. No city manages a population of more than forty thousand (only Burlington comes close) and the chief tourist attraction is Ben and Jerry's ice-cream factory in Waterbury. Though rural, the landscape is not all that agricultural, as much is covered by mountainous forests (the state's name comes from the French vert mont , or green mountain). The people who choose to live here are a mix of hippies and diehard conservatives working together to preserve their environment and lamenting the arrival of yet more ski resorts. One striking feature of Vermont is the absence of billboards, but the cutesy "country stores" which seem to grace every other crossroads can become tedious.

This was the last area of New England to be settled, early in the eighteenth century, with French explorers working their way down from Canada, and American colonists beginning to spread north. Even as that rivalry died down, another developed between settlers from New Hampshire and those from New York. The wealthy New York merchants who built fine homes along the Connecticut River valley thought of themselves as the "River Gods," but the hardy settlers of the lakes and mountains to the west had little time for their patrician ways. Their leader, the now-legendary Ethan Allen , formed his Green Mountain Boys in 1770, proclaiming that "the gods of the hills are not the gods of the valley." During the Revolutionary War, this all-but-autonomous force captured Fort Ticonderoga from the British and helped to win the decisive Battle of Bennington. By 1777, Vermont was an independent republic, with the first constitution in the world explicitly forbidding slavery and granting universal (male) suffrage, but once its boundaries with New York were agreed on, it joined the Union in 1791. Curiously, the two seminal figures of the Mormon religion were both born in Vermont shortly thereafter - Joseph Smith in 1805, and his lieutenant and successor Brigham Young in 1801.

With the occasional exception, such as the extraordinary assortment of Americana at the Shelburne Museum near Burlington, there are few specific goals for tourists. Visitors come in great numbers during two well-defined seasons: to see the fall foliage in the first two weeks of October, and to ski in the depths of winter, when the resorts of Killington , and Stowe further north (home of The Sound of Music 's Trapp family), spring into life. For the rest of the year, you might just as well explore any of the state's minor roads that take your fancy, confident that some picturesque village will be around the next corner. There are far too many to list; we've had to leave out such prime examples as Peru, Grafton and Middlebury . Further information can be picked up from the official Welcome Center on each interstate as it enters Vermont.