The Field Farm overlooks Mount Greylock and the Hopper.
We drove to the Field Farm in Williamstown recently to walk the trails alongside its splendid fields of mown hay. The sun was shining (oh happy day). And we were feeling in harmony with all this open land and the woods surround it and the mountains of purple and soft browns.
Down past the modern cottage and alongside the pond where beavers had built two lodges that climbed the banks and overlapped the trail. We didn’t see any beaver. I think they’re pretty much nocturnal.
The farm’s fields are vast and make up 80 of the property’s 316 acres. Since the mid-1980s the property was given to the Trustees of Reservations by Eleanor Bloedel, the widow of Lawrence Bloedel, a noted art collector and the librarian of Williams College. Their art went to the Williams art museum and to the Whitney in Manhattan.
Any field worthy of the name deserves a hedgerow. This one – I’d call it a double hedgerow – separates the main field from a large one to the west. Below is a cottage the Bloedels built after his discharge from the Army following World War II. They called it the Folly. You use to be able to stay there for the weekend. Following the pandemic it will reopen for guided tours. It’s pictured below in this shot lifted from the Trustees of Reservations’ web page.
This is one of several sculptures from the Bloedel collection remaining on the grounds of the main house. The Trustees had closed the Field Farm to the public after the state took broad steps to fight the virus’s spread. But recently it reopened the trails, while keeping the main house closed to visitors. Babbie and I will be walking up there again soon.