Carlisle, Massachusetts
Great Brook Farm State Park
Photo: John Phelan, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
A working dairy farm where a robot milks the cows, free weekend barn tours in season, an ice cream stand, and more than 20 miles of trails.
Written for ages 3–12.
✓ Played by hand with the kids at the original playtest.
Read this bit out
More than three hundred years ago, English settlers built houses here. The houses are long gone, but the holes where their cellars were are still in the ground, so look for a square dip lined with stones. The farm is still working today, and the cows here are milked by a robot. Each cow walks in when she is ready, and the robot does the rest.
One of your three free places, or the Explorer Pass. What that costs
Before you go
- Time there
- Plan on about 2 hours at the park.
- Parking
- The lot is at 165 North Road, by the farm. $3 a car from April 1 to November 30, whatever your plates say; free the rest of the year.
- Underfoot
- More than twenty miles of trails through open fields and woodland.
- Stroller
- A stroller works on some of it.
- Bathrooms
- There are bathrooms.
- Food
- There is an ice cream stand at the farm. Picnicking is fine, but there are no grills; DCR allows only a propane grill you bring yourself, no charcoal.
24 challenges written for this place
A game deals seven to fifteen of them, so no two visits are alike.
4 things to work out, 4 ways to find your bearings and 4 things growing.
Every game includes this one
Meadow Pond
Make it to Meadow Pond.
A few of the others
Time Traveler
Find something you think is more than 100 years old and explain why.
Mystery Object
Find something strange. See if anybody can guess what it's for.
Stone Wall
Find a stone wall.
Farm Friend
Find a farm animal.
Trail Hunter
Find a trail marker, and work out which trail you're standing on.
Horsepower
Find a horse, or a hoofprint a horse left behind.
The rest are a surprise — that's the whole point.
Also around Carlisle
The Greenough Land
Carlisle
Carlisle's largest pond, made before 1930 to bring in ducks, set in 242 acres of woods, fields and wetlands that reach the Concord River.
The Towle Land
Carlisle
A path over a little dam to an open field of rocky outcrops where bobolinks nest in late spring and summer, with Native stone piles in the woods.
Play this at Great Brook Farm State Park
Free. Works with no signal once you're there.