And Now, New Hamlet Trails to Tread
For a change the Old World is the source of some new thinking. On Saturday when a ribbon is cut in Sag Harbor to mark the opening of a hamlet-to-hamlet trail system on the South Fork, it will be the realization of a waking dream that struck Tony Garro while hoofing the footpaths of southern England.
“A bunch of us went to England,” he said of his Southampton Trails Preservation Society compatriots, “specifically to hike the moors, and one of the first things I noticed was how many trails were on private lands,” even, for example, those at Dartmoor, near Devon, the inspiration for Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Hound of the Baskervilles.”
“The public has the right to hike trails on private land in England,” Mr. Garro, who used to teach in the Massapequa School District and has lived in Noyac for about 18 years, said Monday.
“Many villages in rural England are connected by footpaths, and this is what fascinated me the most. They’re miles long, some of them, connecting villages in a web of trails. So I started to do a little research. Every May all the trails are hiked by British hikers to ensure that the right to hike them is kept open. And most of the landowners have no problem with it. The only thing I ever found, a farmer left a sign saying, ‘Please close the gate,’ for after we passed.”
“Back here, it would buzz around in my head. We have these quaint towns and really beautiful wild lands. We have two invaluable features — the glacial moraine and all these ponds, relics of 20,000 years ago. So why couldn’t we create those footpaths here?”
On Saturday at Mashashimuet Park, after the 10 a.m. ribbon-cutting and refreshments, there will be two hikes on newly opened trails, one, of about three and a half miles, will follow the Long Pond Greenbelt and head along the old railroad bed to Lumber Lane in Bridgehampton.
A second one will trace five and a half rolling miles of the glacial moraine, with water views and large rocks left by the retreating ice sheet, cross the Mulvihill Preserve and skirt the Bridge Golf Course, and wrap up by circling Trout Pond in Noyac.
“And we’ll provide transportation back,” Mr. Garro said.
“We’ve worked on this for a year and a half to two years. We took existing trails and linked them, and created new trails to link. . . . Others will go from Mashashimuet to Elliston Park,” on Big Fresh Pond in North Sea, “and from Elliston to Southampton Village.”
Hampton Bays is a 90-percent certainty, he said, with negotiations still to be ironed out with some residents of Shinnecock Hills, and Flanders and Westhampton Beach are possibilities.
The hamlet-to-hamlet footpath will be marked by green oval blazes, and three new kiosks are up at the Trout Pond, Lumber Lane, and Mashashimuet trailheads.
“There’s so much public land here, a lot has been preserved, so there are no crossings of private land, not yet. . . . Most of the trails are on town lands, but some cross Nature Conservancy lands too. And then there are places like Laurel Valley, which is a county park.”
Every Thursday Southampton Trails Preservation Society volunteers have what Mr. Garro called a work party to blaze trails and clear footpaths. “I would estimate there are 300 miles of trails in Southampton Town, and we’re the primary caretaker. We do hikes every weekend, year round,” this time of year being a particularly good one to hit the woods, tick-wise.
For Mr. Garro, who has had Lyme disease in the past, forgoing his walks is simply not an option, so in the warm-weather months he has taken to wearing clothes pretreated with the insecticide permethrin.
“That’s the only thing out here that keeps it from being Eden, the ticks.”