Napatree Point Conservation Area

Walk the length of Napatree and you reach the crumbling remains of Fort Mansfield, a coastal-defense post the United States government built out here at the turn of the twentieth century. The army bought about sixty acres at the west end of the point in 1898 and armed it with heavy gun batteries, staffing it with as many as a hundred soldiers to guard the approaches to Long Island Sound and the Rhode Island coast.

The fort had a short life. War games soon showed that its guns could themselves be knocked out from an angle they could not defend, and it was declared obsolete and abandoned within a couple of decades, active only from about 1901 to 1926. What is left are the low, sea-worn concrete gun emplacements, weathered and half-buried in sand, a strange and quiet ruin to come upon at the wild tip of a beach walk. It is easy to poke around, but the old concrete has rough edges and drops, so watch children closely.

For a long time Napatree was not wilderness at all. A row of substantial summer homes lined Fort Road along the spit, and the point stretched farther out to sea, with a long northern arm called Sandy Point reaching toward the mainland. On September 21, 1938, a hurricane no one saw coming slammed into the Rhode Island coast with almost no warning, driving a storm surge straight down the length of the point.

The sea swept the houses away completely. Of the forty-two people caught in their Fort Road homes that day, fifteen died, and the surge tore the northern arm loose and reshaped the whole spit. In the aftermath, no one rebuilt on Napatree. The dunes and beach grass slowly reclaimed the sand, and the point became what it is now, a moving, living barrier beach that shifts a little with every big storm, left to the tides and the birds.

Because it was left wild, Napatree is one of the best places to watch birds in southern New England. The mix of open beach, dune, salt marsh, and shallow bay draws migrating and nesting shorebirds in real numbers, and the point sits along a busy Atlantic migration route, so the cast of characters changes with the season. Ospreys nest and fish here, and the tip holds a small off-limits refuge for endangered piping plovers and least terns.

That is why parts of the dunes and grassland are roped off in spring and summer: the plovers nest right on the open sand, their eggs almost invisible, and a single footstep in the wrong place can end a whole clutch. Staying on the beach and the marked routes is not just courtesy here, it is the reason the point still teems with life. Bring binoculars and give the fenced areas a wide berth, and you will see far more for it.

Napatree runs off the village of Watch Hill, at the southwestern corner of Rhode Island in the town of Westerly. You reach the spit on foot from the edge of Watch Hill near Fort Road, and the walk out to Fort Mansfield and back is a few miles of soft sand, so wear real shoes, bring water, and plan on a couple of unhurried hours. There are no restrooms, no snack bars, and no shade out on the point, so carry what you need and pack out every bit of trash.

The catch is getting there: Watch Hill is tiny and parking is scarce and fills early on summer weekends, so the smart plan is an early morning arrival, a shoulder-season visit, or a walk over from wherever you are staying. Once you are past the village, though, the reward is a long, quiet, open shore with the ocean on one hand and the bay on the other, a ruined fort at the end, and shorebirds working the tide line, one of the wildest walks left on the crowded southern New England coast.

The closest Boutel™ stays, so you can turn this stop into an overnight. Each is an independently owned, editorially selected place to stay.