World's End

In the 1880s John Brewer, who owned the land as a farm, planned to turn World's End into a residential subdivision of more than 150 houselots. To lay out the streets he brought in the office of Frederick Law Olmsted, the designer of New York's Central Park and the father of American landscape architecture.

Olmsted's plan traced gently curving carriage roads across the drumlins and lined them with thousands of trees, English elms and hardwoods, to shade the future streets. The roads were graded and the trees were planted around 1890. Then the houses never followed. Brewer's development stalled and was abandoned, but the roads and their now-mature tree canopy remained.

The result is one of the strangest and loveliest landscapes in Massachusetts: a fully designed neighborhood with all of its tree-lined avenues in place and none of its buildings, so that walkers today stroll the shaded lanes of a town that exists only as ground and greenery.

World's End kept nearly becoming something else. In 1945, as the new United Nations searched for a permanent home, the peninsula was among the sites considered for the world body's headquarters before the choice went to Manhattan.

Two decades later the threat was industrial. In the 1960s the land was proposed as the site of a nuclear power plant, a plan that would have transformed the quiet harbor peninsula entirely.

That proposal galvanized the community. In 1967 the Trustees of Reservations, with a large grassroots fundraising campaign by local residents, purchased World's End and protected it permanently. It was one of the early modern land-conservation battles on the South Shore, and it is why the peninsula is open ground today.

World's End is a reservation of the Trustees, formally the Trustees of Reservations, which was founded in 1891 as the first regional land trust of its kind in the world. The organization's model, holding beautiful and historic places in trust for public enjoyment, has since been copied around the globe.

The peninsula is built of drumlins, smooth hills of earth and rock left behind by the glaciers that shaped New England. Four of them rise across the reservation, and their open crowns give the long views that visitors come for.

Around the edges the land meets the sea in rocky shore, rockweed beds, and salt marsh, with tide pools to poke through at low water. The mix of hilltop meadow, wooded lane, and shoreline in one compact place is a big part of the peninsula's appeal.

About four miles of trails and gravel carriage roads loop through the reservation. The most popular walk climbs and curves out toward the far tip, following Olmsted's tree-lined lanes to the open hilltops where Boston's skyline rises across the water.

Because the drumlins are open and exposed, the reservation is best walked with sun protection and water in warm weather, and it is spectacular in the low light of early morning or late afternoon.

Birdwatchers, walkers, and photographers all find their reasons here, but the deepest pleasure is simply the strangeness of the place: a grand landscape laid out for a life that never arrived, left instead to grass, trees, and the tide.

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