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By Alex Oliveira
Hometown Weekly Reporter
If you go far enough out, there’s a point where time starts to turn backwards.
The suburbs and their strips give way to thickening woods and wetlands, and the houses that line the road appear to have been plucked immaculately from a bygone New England. When the houses have all but disappeared, you’ll be at Rocky Narrows Reservation, and if not for the moss on the stone walls, you’d think that they’d have just been placed there by newly arrived settlers.
Rocky Narrows was the first piece of land to be protected by the Trustees Reservation, and with the Sherborn Town Forest flanking the land on three sides, there are nearly 400 square acres available for visitors to explore.
Sweeping down from the small dirt parking lot, the woods and a low stone wall surround a field of tall grass. It’s a welcoming sight on a cold winter day, the sharp blue above and swaying yellow below, and it beckons you through an opening in the trees.
There, the flat dirt woods path is packed hard and pocked with ice and frost that crunches underfoot. Trees tower overhead and arch above, the sky peering through and dropping rays of sun down through the brittle-twigged branches.
A field of swaying grass greets visitors by the parking lot
Then, after a few minutes of tromping, the woods give way on one side to a vast marshland. Tall reeds splay out across the thin ice and the Charles River splits the woods from a farm on the opposite bank.
It’s utterly quiet by now, too - just the hushed rush of the river and the wind through the trees. Nothing lets on that just ten miles east, an interstate highway roars.
Then the path starts to rise. The dirt gives way to rock and roots, and the ground falls away to the left while jutting higher and higher to the right. It’s not quite rock climbing, but it’s certainly hiking, and as the valley drops away below, it’s a wonder to think that not twenty minutes ago, you were standing in an open field of grass.
At the end of the path it looks as if the ground simply falls away from a large rock ledge. This is King Phillip’s Overlook, the precipice of the park and perhaps of the all the suburbs themselves. The cliff drops away like the Old Man in The Mountain, and the Charles River bends long and lazy around the ridge. Off to the left, a farm sits quietly, and to the right, the sun’s reflection is cut through by a train trestle that runs low over the river.
Cattail reeds alight in the setting sun
The park loops around from the overlook through countless wooded trails and spectacular wetlands, eventually leading back, if you choose, to the yellow field, the dirt parking lot, Sherborn’s timeless houses, the suburb’s strips, and the city itself.
Rocky Narrows is vast and quiet. It’s easy to get lost in and a pleasure to do so.
