A trail with a bakery The Browning Mill Pond Trail is a relatively easy hike through some pleasant, if not especially demanding terrain. Easy to follow paths that loop around some very nice ponds and over many small brooks. The park even has a very cool handicap boardwalk that leads around one of the ponds. Lots of water also means lots of mud and bugs in the spring but in the winter the cold winds firm everything up. Because of the water lots of wildlife make this their home. At various times I’ve seen otters, beavers, turtles, deer, snakes, herons, geese, ducks and an occasional red tail hawk. Lots of good fishing and there is a fish hatchery for trout on the west side of Browning Pond. Like most woods in New England these woods hold mysteries. The land has been used for a long time, by the English, Dutch and native tribes before that. Lots of foundations, artifacts, piles of stones and other strange and long forgotten structures. Most of them have tales and stories about them; some believable others dubious at best. Of course Browning Mill Pond has it’s own particular enigma. About 50 meters off one of the main trails an unusual looking chimney stands alone in the woods. Not an ordinary house chimney, this one looks large and has a huge door for an oven or something. I first though that it was a kiln but when I asked an elderly lady that I met walking in the woods she told me that it was an old bakery. When I asked her why anyone would put a bakery in the middle of the woods she just shrugged and said, why not? People did all sorts of strange things for their own strange reasons years ago. She told me a story about how her grandfather spend one whole summer building a stone shed for a boat even though he never actually had a boat to put in the shed. She said he wouldn’t put anything else in there because it was for boats only. I never did find out for sure if the chimney was part of a bakery or something else. As Rorschach would say, I will investigate further, but it really doesn’t matter. The area is a nice place for a picnic, do some fishing, or go on a leisurely hike. And like most woods around here you’ll probably discover some unusual and odd eccentricities of the past. A trail with a bakery.
