The Mount, Lenox, Massachusetts

Lenox is in the very up market area known as ‘The Berkshires’ which you may have heard of. Due to road works it took me nearly two hours to reach instead on just under an hour. North Adams and Adams are apparently interesting places, but they did not look their best in rain whilst queuing at road works. So I returned by a longer route, which was pretty and less frustrating.

Massachusetts is visibly more prosperous and well kept than anywhere I have been since Boothbay Harbour in Maine, and that seems ages ago now. Most of it has a very well groomed look.

Hopefully most of you have read at least one book by Edith Wharton (1862-1937), the first American woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. If not, I suggest you give her a try, though I warn against ‘Ethan Frome’, the most depressing book I think I have ever read. If you want to know more about her, use Google.

About 1902 she designed The Mount with an architect. I believe she was very influential in all the design matters, outside, inside and landscaping. Due to her husband’s mental health issues, she left in 1911 and lived the rest of her life in France. The house had a chequered history, but has now been restored, though only a few of the contents are original, though they have access to many plans and photographs, which they have used to guide the restoration. She came from ‘old money’ but lived during the Golden Age I saw at Newport, Rhode Island. She had very different ideas of how to live well and comfortable when very rich.

Her bedroom

The dining room

Passage that connected many rooms

The garden was once cultivated over many acres, starting with formal gardens near the house, through colourful flower meadows, to merge seamlessly with the woods and a large lake further away. So far only the formal gardens have been restored.

 

Of course mid October is not an ideal time to look at a formal garden!

Documents of her subsequent life in France have come to light and a French woman, Claudine Lesage, has interviewed key people and written a book ‘Edith Wharton in France’, which is available in translation. I intend to try reading it in French when I return home – at least it will keep my French ticking over.

I wasn’t actually staying in Massachusetts, but in Brattleboro, Vermont on the Connecticut River. Brattleboro is where Vermont, New Hampshire and Massachusetts meet, and is a lot cheaper to stay in than anywhere in Massachusetts! I stayed 4 miles out of town on the edge of the country. I forgot to take a photo of the house, but it is a large white clapboard house in well over an acre of land, with a very nice AirBnB hostess with a 17 year old son. He wasn’t there all the time. I suspect he spends part of his time with his father, somewhere not too far away.

Brattleboro has the makings of a nice town, but it is not doing much to promote itself. This is what greets you as you cross the bridge from New Hampshire. Note the enormous ‘pot mums’. They are everywhere at the moment in a wide range of colours.

Downtown Brattleboro (with more pot mums)

Main Street with yet more pot mums

The Connecticut River from the bridge to New Hampshire

The river is even wider than it appears as the jetty is on an island and there is another bridge from the island to New Hampshire.

Looking the other way

A lot could be done with the river bank, and some of the land is derelict, so the opportunity exists.

Much of the time I was there, the weather was doing its best to move into November; grey, drizzly, misty but much warmer than grey November days in the UK being in the mid 60s F most of the time.

There were two days when the weather cleared up, and I made the most of them.

Massachusetts is much more gentle countryside, rolling hills and wide river valleys, so farms are larger and anything called a mountain is really only a hill. I chanced upon a walk on the Hawley Trail, in the Dubuque State Forest near the village of Hawley. This area is largely used for X-country skiing and mountain biking, but it also makes for interesting walking. It was originally settled and then abandoned, and there are still remains of the settlements.

This is the most impressive of the remains, a charcoal kiln dating from the 1870s, and is near the car park. After visiting it I had to return as the former path through the woods from there is on private property and has been closed.

The red line is where I actually walked as recorded by the AllTrails app. I walked clockwise and the really wiggly bit at the beginning took quite a long time. This is really a mountain bike route, called ‘The goatherd’s quest’. The trails are not marked in anyway except for noticeboards where they leave the old abandoned settlement cart tracks and roads.

This was one of the easier bits to route find on. Early on I met a couple of mountain bikers, and even though I knew they had just gone along my route, I could see no marks they had left at all. Fortunately my experience of reading the ground on Scottish Munros left me with the requisite skills in working out the likely route, which did switchbacks and U-turns. It was gently undulating with many concealed rocks and roots. I caught up with the mountain bikers later on, and they told me it was very hard on the arms, and they didn’t actually move much faster than walking pace.

A couple of times it was reassuring to find a small bridge over a boggy patch, which meant I was on route.

They don’t get much wind by British standards, but trees still fall over.

These rocks are the key to the Goatherd’s Quest.

This was an unusual sight on my travels. So far I had not seen any stone walls. But now I was in the earliest part of New England to be settled, and the early settlers brought ideas with them from England, including the idea of boundary walls.

After the wiggly bit I spent most of the rest of the walk on the old cart tracks.

This was the widest track, and was also walled. It was called Penobscot Road, which is from the same Native American source as the Penobscot peninsula in Maine.

Occasionally land has been cleared fairly recently.

The map indicated a ‘Settler’s cellar’ not far from one track, so I went to explore. It looks as though they excavated a cellar, and walled it, then constructed a log cabin on top. I think it may have been the only way to store anything without wildlife getting at it.

Turning through 180º, I could see that the building was within about 20 yards from one of the tracks, and it was only about 100 yards from a cross roads. However I could not see a water source for it.

A couple of miles further on, two more ‘cellars’ were marked as near the track I was then on. I didn’t look for them, but this little stream was no doubt their water source. This area was marked as South Hawley on the map.

The last half mile of the walk was along the road, through current Hawley.

It has its church, several farms, a graveyard, and, of course, a fire station.

I wasn’t tempted to try the road going off by the graveyard..

A thoroughly enjoyable walk on a lovely autumn day. I saw a total of three mountain bikers and one jogger. All of us were wearing hi-viz yellow or flame orange. I changed my route after inspecting the cellar, as I could hear gunshots in the distance. I had a choice of two loops back to the car, so went away from the hunters. Near the end of the tracks I was passed by a pick-up driven by a hunter in full camouflage clothing. I am told it is turkey shooting season at the moment.

On my travels I have seen at least a dozen small flocks of female wild turkeys, but always when driving and I have never managed to get a photo of them. They walk and run, and move surprisingly fast.

I have now decided to split this post, as it will be too long if I include all I originally intended.