Brookline's Outdoor Sculpture Park

Even if you've never heard of an outdoor sculpture park, you can probably form a good idea of what one is just by hearing the term. And I think you'd be right. The idea is to take two things that are each really cool in their own right - artistic creations and hiking through the woods - and combine them into a single afternoon of fun and adventure.

Brookline's Outdoor Sculpture Park, officially known as the Andres Institute of Art, was founded in 1996 by philanthropist Paul Andres and serves to "provide a place in which individuals may experience art and nature in tandem." Their Facebook page describes them as "always open", and with 140 acres they've been able to expand to more than 90 exhibits and counting while still leaving plenty of room for social distancing.

There is no charge to visit here - your only costs are going to be the gas it takes you to make the drive plus a small donation should you choose to leave one. Nor does anyone actively work here. Just show up and grab yourself a map to begin your self-guided hike, and prepare to see all ranges of exhibits. At one extreme will be things like this one that could almost be believed to be a curiosity of nature.

And at the other extreme will be those that have no earthly business in the woods of New Hampshire, exhibits that will leave you marveling at how someone got them out here to begin with.

Expect a few yuks out here, as well. Several exhibits do a good job of combining both talent and humor, such as this one where by the time I figured out what the joke was, it was on me.

But the day I can't come to a place like this and have some laughs is the day I no longer like fun, and our day soon turned into seeing what scenes we could create by interacting with each exhibit. In this one I was nearly tricked into trading my brand new cell phone for a chunk of rock.

 When Technology Meets the Stone Age

As the person who accounts for 100% of the hair in our relationship, my wife was the only one qualified to pose with this next statue. 

Mirror Image

We took this trip back in 2018 with our friends from WeRmudfun - two people who enjoy fun so much they included it in their name - and it turned out to be one of our most memorable adventures that year. If you'd like to see a little more of what Brookline's Outdoor Sculpture Park has to offer, watch this video Chuck & Cheryl recorded of our antics that day. But as you're watching it remember one thing, my day job is as an accountant, not an actor.

The Raymond Cliff Caves, Weare NH

Raymond Cave is in the side of Raymond Cliff, near Everett station. Its opening is large enough for a man to comfortably enter erect. For the first forty feet it is about twelve feet high and eight feet wide, then for the next forty feet it is of smaller dimensions. It is very cold in summer. The cave is formed of huge, angular blocks which have fallen from the cliff above.

- The History of Weare, New Hampshire, 1735-1888

In 1876 John Clough paid $16.76 in taxes for 339 acres of property he owned in eastern Weare, near the bordering town of Dunbarton. Although a pittance by today's standards, these taxes were something he paid for year after year to hold on to the land, refusing to sell despite many offers. Clough loved this area and feared that if he sold the land it would be logged, and in 1932 he deeded the property to the State of NH, forever preserving it. A subsequent lawsuit trimmed the state's portion down to 150 acres, but Clough would be happy to know that nearly 100 years after gifting it away we still have his former property to enjoy, now known as the Clough State Park.

 

We explored here during the beginnings of the Covid-19 craziness, back when seeing someone in the woods with a mask on would still make you look twice, and probably pick up your pace. We chose this location thinking there wouldn't be any crowds, and although we counted a few dozen cars in the parking lot there was enough open space for us to obey the six-foot rule before it was even a rule.

No matter which trail you start off with the first thing you're going to notice is the 2,000 foot long Hopkinton Everett Dam, situated smack in the middle of everything. Completed in the 1960s after years in the making, this 115 foot tall structure is part of the Hopkinton-Everett Lakes Flood Risk Management Project, a mouthful of a project put into place to end a series of devastating floods that rampaged this area in the first part of the 1900s.

Our son Logan joined us for this trip, but it wasn't to admire the engineering of the dam or for any history lessons. To the west of the park are the Raymond Cliffs, and they are loaded with all sort of rocks and ledges to climb on, one of his favorite pastimes that doesn't require a keyboard and a mouse.

And for anyone without a teenager of their own, when you go climbing with your 16-year old son this is their idea of waiting up for you.

Logan had his own motive for coming here, and my wife Tina did as well. I have taken her on some hellacious hikes over the years, but today meant an afternoon of walking on her perfect idea of what a trail should be - flat, near water, spacious, and most importantly without any bushwhacking.  

Then there was me - and I was here for the caves. These ledges are a playground for all sorts of caverns and cubbyholes to explore. Many are small like this one, dark places where you're apt to go eyeball to eyeball with a porcupine or something equally cuddly.

Other caves were much larger. Steve Higham mapped these ledges in the June 2017 edition of The Northeastern Caver, with three of them being large enough to qualify for a name. There is the Lower Carr Cave, the Devils Step Cave (a name you'll understand if you navigate its southern entrance), and the largest and most well know of this area, the Raymond Cave. It's a mid-size cave as far as New Hampshire goes, measuring 99 feet in length, and throwing in the historical aspect makes for a really cool place to explore.

After our afternoon of playing - I was able to find all three of the named caves - we still had one more quest to complete. John Clough left his mark on society by giving us all this land, but he left his mark in a more literal sense, as well. Look for the largest free-standing boulder at the base of the Raymond Cliffs, then take a walk around it toward its water-side. Although perhaps not as prominent as it was a hundred years ago, where he engraved his name on this boulder is still clear enough to read to this today: John Clough.

Clough State Park is one of those places where we hadn't even left the parking lot and we were already planning our next trip here. This is a beautiful and unique area that has something to offer for anyone who doesn't like spending their weekends on the couch. That describes probably every single one of our friends, and we look forward to introducing them to this place when, and hopefully not if, our world returns to normal.

References:

https://extension.unh.edu/resources/files/Resource006141_Rep8795.pdf

https://www.nhstateparks.org/visit/state-parks/clough-state-park

Pig Lane's Abandoned Community

We love a good hike, we love local history, and we love coming across random artifacts in the woods. Wrapped up in 365 acres of conservation land that was once home to several residences and a pair of mills - one grist and one shingle - Pig Lane of Strafford has each of these things and more. And in this era of each person walking around with their own personal six-foot safety zone, Pig Lane is far enough off most people's radar to make for a perfect afternoon in the woods.

A couple of questions might come to mind when you read the above paragraph. Where the heck did the name Pig Lane come from, and what the heck is a shingle mill? According to the History of Strafford County New Hampshire and Representative Citizens (1914), Pig Lane is a name that seems to have just always been there, and its origin has been lost to time. As for what a shingle mill is, Google had a much easier time with that question. Up until the 19th century when wooden roofs were a standard thing for most houses, there were mills designed for the sole purpose of making these wedge shaped shingles.

Our hike began at the main trailhead where Range Road and New Road meet, a lot just big enough for five or six cars if you park them creatively. A kiosk and map show the variety of trails and where most of the remnants are, but as we learned over the course of two separate hikes here, there's more out in these woods than what is shown on the map.

Probably the only mistake you can make is to take your first right at the four way intersection you'll encounter just minutes into the hike. It will bring you to the power lines and who knows where beyond this, but I can tell you from experience it won't be Pig Lane. After backtracking I eventually led our group to the Beaver Pond Loop, which after a marsh splits onto Foss Mill Trail, a beautiful river walk that winds along the Isinglass.

You might spot the remains of a foundation on the opposite side of the water, which is the former site of the Grey/Foss/Swaine Mill. Don't be tempted to try crossing for a closer look though, there's a much easier, and dryer, way to get there if you finish Foss Mill Trail and loop over the bridge.

This is where Pig Lane bisects the conservation property and where you'll start finding all the goodies shown at the kiosk. After seeing the mill - just a 220 foot walk down Mill Access Trail - our next detour was to the Foss Family Cemetery where we counted 13 fieldstone markers, none of which were engraved. Someone has figured out who is buried here though, for one stone was marked as a Civil War soldier, and another as a soldier from the Revolutionary War.

Perhaps the same person or group who marked these veteran's graves has also done a wonderful job piecing together other parts of Pig Lane's history. The next foundation we saw was the Swaine's house, where a sign shows you not only what that house looked like but tells the story of a flood that forced the family's evacuation out a second story window. Seems like there wouldn't be much left of the structure after that much water, but subsequent research told us the house actually survived this devastating flood and was lived in for many years afterward. Today, this is all that is left of it.

On the west side of Pig Lane you'll find what is labeled as a 1700's mill, and I'm still not clear on whether this one was the grist mill or the shingle mill. But I do know what it looked like. Stairs lead you down to the water, where along the way you'll find this sign showing the old mill and where to look for its remains.

Back on Pig Lane we continued north past a handful of foundations - which if you're a geocacher you'll want to pay close attention to - before finding a second cemetery which was not listed on the map. And unlike the earlier one that told us where the people were buried but not who they were, this cemetery told us who the people were but not where they were buried, as several of the engraved headstones have toppled from their original location.

One more off-the-map treasure our friend spotted was this vehicle deeper into the woods, and you can guess what we spent the next ten minutes doing. I though it looked like an old hot-rod from the sixties, but the heavy duty frame suggested it's probably the remains of a work vehicle.

Our final tally came to 4.6 miles and there were still some trails we didn't get to. But the ones we did were well groomed, had beautiful scenery, no crowds, and even held a few surprises. And unlike our more rigorous trails up north this system has no real climbing to speak of, making it an easy and unique afternoon in the woods that should appeal to explorers of all levels.

Links:

Connect with life in the 1700s in Strafford The Isinglass Conservation Reserve Trails reveal early settler history  - Foster's Daily Democrat

History of Strafford County, New Hampshire and Representative Citizens - John Scales

The Acworth Chambers

Located on a hilltop in Acworth are many small enclosures and stone rows that have excited the curiosity of people for the last century. William Goodwin’s 1947 book History of Great Ireland in New England compared the site in Acworth to similar sites in Europe and hypothesized that the chambers and stone rows were built by Irish monks settling the northeast centuries before the arrival of Columbus.

- Acworth Chambers, New England Antiquities Research Association

The Acworth Chambers have been on my radar for many years, but I never had enough clues on their whereabouts to take a shot at finding them. Anywhere from three to four stone chambers - beehive huts similar to those in Newton, Danville, and of course Mystery Hill in Salem - were said to exist in this western New Hampshire town. Several sources confirmed the chambers were on Kennedy Hill, but with only that to go on finding them meant I was facing an all out police-sweep over a patch of woods Google Earth estimated to be at least 1,000 acres, and there were just too many caves and mineshafts I had better intel on than to spend a weekend tackling those odds. That changed a few years ago when I was given a solid lead to where they were. Not exact coordinates, but a few landmark references that would bring me to a certain location, from which point if I were to keep walking uphill the structures would be a can't miss. It still took a while for this expedition to find its way to the top of my to-do list, but finally this spring my wife and I made the cross-state drive to try and search them out.

I'm pretty good at sniffing out the existence of unusual places such as this, but my skill level takes a significant dropoff when it comes to figuring out the best way to reach them. I'm a direct-line kind of hiker - meaning I'll walk through a swamp if my GPS tells me that's the quickest route - and so being a tour guide is probably nowhere in my future. Nor have I gotten the knack for taking those few extra minutes to figure out the smartest route to drive someplace. Had I done so on this day I would have realized the class VI road we were headed toward was closed to motorized vehicles, and that we could have parked on the opposite side of Kennedy Hill and saved over two miles of walking.

But if I was one of those people who thinks everything happens for a reason, I'd say we were meant to walk this road in order to find some of the more impressive stone walls we've come across. I'm not that type of deterministic person, but we did spend the first part of our day admiring all the treasures these woods were loaded with.

We also found a unique one that I'm still scratching my head over. We've walked many miles of stone walls in our travels, but I've never come across one that had a colorful rock like this as part of it. Unlike Red in Shawshank Redemption though, I found no tin can full of money underneath.

Eventually we hit the first of the landmarks we'd been told to watch for, and after taking a series of turns we were in the vicinity of where the chambers were said to be. My wife and I are way too competitive to look for these things together, so she picked her side of the woods and I picked my side and the chase was on. I won round one when from a distance I spotted this completely intact chamber.

Acworth Chamber

I mention that this first chamber was fully intact because everything we'd researched prior to this had referred to these as the Acworth Chambers, but this was the only complete one we found. My wife located a pile of rocks that resembled a cairn you'd find on a mountain trail, and although I wasn't initially impressed she pointed out the flat stones similar to those on the intact chamber's walls and a nearby slab that may have been part of this one's roof. She was quite certain this had once been another chamber that was destroyed or collapsed in on itself, in later research described it as exactly that in The Ruins of Great Ireland in New England, by William Goodwin.

Collapsed Chamber

Structure number three was also a tricky one. Although obviously something man-made, my first thought was that this was a firepit built in recent years, probably by some locals who thought this an interesting place to hang out. We went back and forth on whether it was the dismantled remains of a third chamber, but in the end we're just weekend warriors and not serious researchers and we left with more questions than answers. Soon after we reached out to James Gage of Stone Structures of Northeastern United States, a local expert I've gone to several times when I've gotten myself in over my head. He was familiar with the site and explained that this third structure was a ceremonial Native American enclosure, saying the following:

"Enclosures are well documented within Native American cultures across the U.S. They come in a variety of shapes, size, and building materials. Enclosures defined a sacred space in which a ceremonial or ritual took place. In many cases they defined a ceremonial space in which a person interacted with one or (more) spirits. They were used by medicine people as well (as) ordinary members of tribes. In the American West enclosures are associated with vision quest rituals. The northeast tribes did not have a strong vision quest tradition and therefore the enclosures were likely used for other ceremonies."

- James Gage, 2020

Native American Ceremonial Enclosure

Gage allowed me to share this information as part of his mission to educate the public about historical locations such as this one, and to encourage their preservation. I also appreciated his insight as to who built them in the first place, because you could put two stone structures next to each other and I wouldn't be able to identify which one was built by Native Americans for ceremonial purposes, and which one was built by local youths to sit around a fire telling ghost stories - perhaps every bit a ceremonial purpose in its own right. The structures we found that day are believed to be built by the former group, and having stood on this hilltop for possibly hundreds of years already, with the proper respect and preservation they'll hopefully be standing here for hundreds of more to come.

Other Cool Chambers:

Stone Chambers of Littleton

Newton's Stone Chamber

Danville's Beehive Hut