10 Trustees of Reservations holdings, all diverse by design

At Weir River Farm in Hingham, animals get up close.

By Paul E. Kandarian

Globe correspondent / October 6, 2012

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OCEAN VIEW: World’s End , Hingham This hilly 251-acre site is a stunner, with incredible views of the faraway Boston skyline on one side and the much-closer Hull on the other. Here you traverse windswept meadows, woods, and rocky shores accessible via hiking trails. The land had been drawn up to be a housing development in the 19th century (Frederick Law Olmsted laid it out), but that fizzled, leaving a canopy of trees over wide-open carriage roads that are now hiking trails. Other plans failed, too, including locating the United Nations here in 1945 and a nuclear plant in the 1960s. Four coastal drumlins with marshes, fields, woodlands, and red cedar and blueberry thickets make this a prime place to take a walk — and your camera. Martin’s Lane, 781-740-7233, $6 for nonmembers

MOUNTAIN VIEW: Monument Mountain , Great Barrington Hike to the top of the 1,642-foot Squaw Peak on a clear day and you’ll see Mount Greylock near the Vermont border and the Catskills of New York, and if you’re very lucky, the occasional soaring bald eagle. This is a place long inspirational to writers and artists. In 1850 hiking buddies Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville ran into a storm and took shelter in a cave, where it is said, they talked at length, giving Melville ideas for a new book he was writing, “Moby-Dick.” Route 7, 413-298-3239, free

URBAN RESPITE: Allandale Woods, West Roxbury The 10-acre site near Faulkner Hospital in Boston is a chunk of green space that’s a popular spot to get away from the surrounding urbanity. Part of the Boston Natural Areas Network, it is an affiliate of the Trustees of Reservations. It boasts a canopy of sugar maple, white oak, and shagbark hickory, with vestiges of old stone walls, and is a “very pretty place to hike,” with good signage and ample parking, said Valerie J. Burns, network president. Allandale Street, 617-542-7696, www.bostonnatural.org, free

SUBURBAN CHARMER: Bird Park , Walpole The open-space 89-acre park in the middle of a residential area is ideal for tossing a Frisbee, as well as hiking, tennis, playing in the new playground, and taking in the occasional show at its outdoor theater. Red maples dominate the landscape where you’ll find white pine, white and northern red oak, and hemlock, a series of paths that cross stone bridges, and ponds and gurgling brooks (one pond was built as a swimming hole). Park designer John Nolen in the 1920s envisioned it as “a sequestered breathing place, a combination of broad, sun-swept meadow lands, speckled with shadowed glades, higher tree-screened knolls for the lover of shade, the whole set to the music of a babbling stream.” He got it right. Washington Street, 508-668-6136, free

Paul E. Kandarian can be reached at kandarian@globe.com.