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Grant Brook Trails
Lyme, NH
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Uses: hiking, snowshoeing, and skiing, bird watching
Please Read this before visiting this trail...
Map of this trail
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Misty morning at the mouth of Grant Brook
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Grant Brook falls 2,500 feet from its source on Smarts Mountain, through the villages of Lyme Center and Lyme; delivering run-off gathered from its 10 square mile watershed to the Connecticut River. The Grant Brook corridor is a rich riparian plant and animal habitat, of historical interest, and with excellent recreational possibilities. Several trails follow the last stretch of the brook, skirting along rock walls and pastures with wonderful views of surrounding hills; passing through beaver meadows, mixed hardwood and softwood forests, and open fields. Three areas of protected land with trails are described below:
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Lower Grant Brook Trail: This gently- to moderately graded trail from Lyme School to the river is 1.4 miles one way or 2.5 miles via the Lyme Hill Trail. Much of it follows an early road along the brook, through meadows and pastures, past old bridges, and along cool alleys of hemlock. Junctions on the Lower Grant Brook Trail are marked with yellow metal arrows on posts, not to be confused with snowmobile trail signs that are yellow with black arrows. Lyme Hill Trail is steeper and follows a snowmobile trail across a bridge, going about a half a mile up the side of Lyme Hill to a junction marked by a small white sign, where a right-hand turn leads down a path towards the River Road. The historic Gilbert Cemetery, burial place of Lyme’s first family, the Sloans, and of several of Lyme’s Revolutionary War soldiers, is off a short spur trail.
Directions: To start from Lyme village, park at the Lyme School and walk through the playground and across a swale and athletic fields to the marked trailhead at the stone wall. To start from the river, go south on River Road from the Lyme-East Thetford bridge 0.7 miles to the bridge over Grant Brook. Here, a few cars can pull off to the side of the road south of the bridge, and hikers can enter the trail on a farm road north of the brook.
Big Rock Nature Preserve: This 23-acre preserve on the south side of Lyme village between Route 10 and Market Street protects the Grant Brook corridor and a large wetland area where beaver have been active for many years. The three-quarter mile Big Rock Trail is gently-graded, well-marked, and well-maintained by the town of Lyme. The Big Rock which gave the preserve its name is a fragment broken off from a nearby ledge of erosion-resistant metamorphic rock. In it are carved initials dating from the 1800’s. For a map and additional information visit Lyme’s website.
Directions: To start at the east end, drive to the end of the Lyme Common and turn right. Go south on Market Street about an eighth of a mile, and park along the side of the road. The trailhead is near a group of mailboxes on the right. To start at the west end, park on the east side of Route 10, just north of Grant Brook and about a quarter mile south of the Converse Free Library. There are blue trailhead signs at both entrances.
Johnson Loop: This picturesque trail in Lyme Center can be hiked one way or as a loop. The terrain is mostly gentle to moderate, with a few somewhat steeper sections that could be challenging on skis. Most of the trail is through mixed softwood forest, with the Upper Trail (0.9 mile one way) paralleling pastureland and providing a view over farmland to the Winslow Ledge and the Dartmouth Skiway trails. From the Lower Trail (0.8 mile one way) Grant Brook can be heard and occasionally spotted through the trees.
Directions: To start at the east end of the trail, take the Dorchester Road east from the Lyme Common (Route 10) for 1.2 miles and take a left on Franklin Hill Road. Parking is available next to the first barn on the left. The trail entrance is off Franklin Hill Road at the edge of the pasture downslope of the barn. To start at the west end, take the Dorchester Road east 0.8 mile from the Lyme Common and park in the pull-out on the right, just past the bridge over Grant Brook. The trail entrance is across the road on the northwest side of the bridge. The trail is marked with yellow blazes, with double blazes at turning points and intersections. From either end, look for the trail to split when you come to a stone wall.
Attention: The northern portion of the Johnson Loop Trail (the Upper Trail) sustained serious damage during the recent Nor'easter. For safety's sake, this part of the trail is now closed. It will reopen once salvage logging operations and cleanup work are complete.
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Pastoral scene on original Grant easement
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Hikers on Lower Grant Brook Trail, 2002
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Exploring Grant Brook Trails:
In the winter of 1767-1768 Benjamin Grant came up the Connecticut River on the ice, hauling his great millstones to set up Lyme’s first gristmill on a swift-running stretch of brook not far inland from the river. According to the Lyme Historical Society’s 1976 history, Patterns and Pieces, the mill was essential to the town’s survival and to establishing Lyme as a proper community of consequence, no longer merely a pioneering settlement. Two hundred and twenty years later, Benjamin Grant’s great-great-great grandson, Clyde Grant, placed a conservation easement on nine acres along the brook bearing his ancestor’s name. And a decade after that, the citizens of Lyme and the Upper Valley Land Trust worked to protect the rest of his estate and a number of other properties that together conserved the entire 1_ mile stream corridor from Lyme village to the Connecticut River.
Continued efforts through to the present have protected several other riparian buffer areas along Grant Brook - all part of a long-term Grant Brook Conservation Project that has brought together the resources of private citizens donating funds, land, conservation easements, and time; as well as organizations from the local, including the Lyme Conservation Commission and Lyme Foundation, to the federal, with a generous grant from the North American Wetlands Council to protect land around the mouth of Grant Brook. UVLT has been a partner throughout, coordinating these diverse partners in a truly cooperative, broad-based conservation effort.
The lowland hardwood forests and wetlands of the Lower Grant Brook properties are particularly rich habitat for both plants and wildlife. The area contains deep deposits of lake bottom sediments deposited 10,000 years ago at the bottom of Lake Hitchcock - a long, narrow band of glacial meltwater that was dammed by glacial deposits 140 miles to the south. Farther upstream are found huge Ammonoosuc volcanic boulders of mineral rich amphibolite. The quality of the soils, abundant water, and the different slopes and aspects provide a variety and a richness of habitat that are rare in New Hampshire. This ecologically diverse area caught the attention of the New Hampshire Audubon Society, which entered into a partnership with UVLT to manage the southern, Lyme Hill part of the Lower Grant Brook property as an Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary.
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The area supports over 300 species of vascular plants, including a number of state-listed threatened or endangered plants. Two plants found in a 1999 survey – the large toothwort and stiff gentian – are species that had not been reported in New Hampshire for over 100 years. An outcrop of amphibolite boulders harbors a rare species of walking fern. In addition, a 1999 bird survey identified more than 60 bird species. Among the bird species two – the Yellow-throated Vireo and the Blue-gray Gnatcatcher – are “southern riparian” species at the northern limit of their geographic ranges, and found almost exclusively in habitats such as this one, which are quite limited in distribution. Wetland bird surveys on May 18, 1999 also detected four species of frogs: American toad, spring peeper, greater grey treefrog, and green frog. Large mammals noted include beaver, white-tailed deer, black bear, porcupine, and coyote.
North of Route 10, in an area behind the Lyme Common, is the Big Rock Nature Preserve, made up of 23 acres of land generously donated to the Town of Lyme by the Greenwood, Bircher, Strout, and Guyre families. Here Grant Brook meanders through shrubby wetlands and beaver ponds fringed with cattails and high-bush cranberry, passes floodplain forest, and takes diversions into channels dug by industrious beavers. A century ago this land was mostly cleared. The brook was open and unshaded; along its banks were close-cropped sheep pastures, an apple orchard, and a stone wall-lined lane leading to a country store. Today the forest and other stream-side vegetation serve as a riparian buffer protecting the quality of the water in Grant Brook, capturing sediment from storm water runoff and filtering pollutants before they can corrupt the stream. The shaded stream is cooler and able to provide more oxygen and cover for cold-water fish and their food than it did a century ago. Adjacent to the brook are silty-bottomed wetlands created by beaver and hosting a variety of wetland wildlife, including otter, mink, and moose. Bear visit the rocky knoll above the brook and deer winter over in the hemlocks and dense forest to the south.
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Beaver lodge, Big Rock Preserve
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Wolf Tree, Big Rock Preserve
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Reminders of the past are seen in the stone walls crossing the now-forested property, the occasional apple tree, and several large “wolf trees” – trees whose spreading lower branches indicate that they once grew in the open - perhaps along the edge of a field. Freed from the necessity to compete for light, the wolf trees branched out, unlike the surrounding younger trees that have grown straight-stemmed, racing one another upwards to achieve a place in the sun of the forest canopy. Wolf trees are often ungainly in shape and riddled with cavities, and thus of little value for timber harvest; however these very features make them valuable habitat for squirrels, birds, and other wildlife.
The farthest upstream property so far protected under the Grant Brook Conservation Project is the former Johnson property. Sitting up high on the side of a hill above Lyme Center and facing south are the sloping fields, pastures, and forest lands that once belonged to Louise Johnson. At age 87 and with diminishing eyesight, Mrs. Johnson could no longer live in the small white house on the property, but she remembered fondly the years of living there with here husband “enjoying this view, this life in the country.” “Our children learned about nature here,” she said. “I wanted to pass along the opportunity to enjoy this place – the way we have – to future residents.”
View from lookout on Johnson Loop
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Lyme Historians Patterns and Pieces p. 22: Tannery, established 1846
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Mrs. Johnson’s legacy protects much more than a fine view and life in the country. The fields and forests are home to a diversity of plants and animals, including goshawk and partridge, deer and spring peepers. The hay in the fields feeds local farm animals and supports local farm business. The timber from the woodland will go to a local mill from time to time, carrying on yet another traditional use. These same pastures most likely once grazed sheep that supplied wool to the Franklin fulling mill, a wool-processing business built in 1795 on the banks of Grant Brook just northwest of the junction of Dorchester and Franklin Hill Roads. And timber from the property may well have been used in the business that supplanted the fulling mill in the late 1800’s, a “sawing and turning” shop producing chair legs, ladders, and ox-yokes. In addition, the property’s hemlocks would have been handy to the tannery established in 1846 just downstream of the “sawing and turning shop.” The tannery was associated with yet another sawmill just across the brook – the tannery using hemlock bark in curing leather, while the sawmill processed the wood from the stripped trees. The cascade here is still known as Tannery Falls and the basement of the tannery is now buried under Dorchester Road. A photograph of the tannery taken in 1899 and reproduced in the Lyme Historians’ Patterns and Pieces is shown here.
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Johnson Loop
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| Big Rock Nature Preserve
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| Lower Grant Brook
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View a bigger version of the map on screen
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Trail Use Guidelines
• Carry out what you carry in.
• Stay on the trail and use only designated trailhead parking areas.
• Stay off trails during spring melt, when soils are soft and easily eroded.
• Be respectful of other trail users and be courteous to trail neighbors.
• Control your dog(s). Do not allow dogs to disturb livestock, wildlife, or sensitive natural areas. Pets are not allowed on some trails.
• Close farm gates behind you.
• For your safety during hunting seasons, wear blaze orange.
• Follow Leave No Trace guidelines.
While these trails are available for community use free of charge, their maintenance depends on the good stewardship and financial support of users. Donations for the trail program may be sent to: Trails, Upper Valley Land Trust, 19 Buck Road, Hanover, NH 03755.
Please contact UVLT Stewardship Manager Jay Waldner (603-643-6626)
to report trail maintenance needs or recommendations.
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