Landscape photography is often associated with travel to fantastic locations, epic hikes and fantastic vistas. And while this does sometime happen, often with travel to far off places a plane ride away, we are far more often slinking out for an afternoon to somewhere local and making the best of what you have locally.
And for many of us this could be boring. Fortunately living in New Hampshire, I have access to lots of locations that are within an easy day’s drive with a 150-mile radius. (Yes, driving 300 miles for a day trip is not unusual over here …)
But the trips most often taken are those that are within a 20-mile radius of home. And as luck would have it, you can find some interesting things in the woods round here that can be quite unexpected.
These woods are all secondary growth. The original forest was entirely felled in the late 1700 and early 1800 to make way for farming. But the ground here tends to grow rocks as much as anything else. The history of the farms is visible everywhere if you know where to look. And it’s hiding in plain sight.
Everywhere you look in the woods here you see these stone walls, looking oddly out of place in the forest.
These are old field boundaries, built up over time as the farmers removed the boulders from the land so they could work it.
Most of these are not small, and every single one was moved by hand & horse from the field to where they are now.
You see this everywhere in New Hampshire.
And then relics of an industrial past can emerge unexpected from the woods. What the history of this excavator is, nobody seems to know. It is an Osgood excavator. The Osgood company was founded in Mario, Ohio in 1910 and went defunct in 1954.
At a wild guess I would say that this dates from maybe the 1930’s or so. The tracks are still there, sitting in the pool of water where it was abandoned, clearly decades ago before the town got built up around this section of forest.
Here it sits, a testament to a former time, trees growing up around it.
Where it lies has become home to a multitude of frogs as nature slowly swallows it up.
