Willis Woods Is Getting Its First Real Trails. You Can Already Walk Most of It.

At 1452 Main Street, at the far northern end of Lynnfield, a small parking lot opens onto a marked 0.8-mile loop through mature forest. Essex County Greenbelt owns these 21 acres and calls them the Lynnfield Woodlot. The loop climbs and drops about 75 feet. Past the Woodlot, the land keeps going. Willis Woods covers more than 600 acres of undeveloped forest between Lynnfield, Middleton, Peabody and North Reading, with the Ipswich River along its northern edge.

Town Meeting set aside $30,000 in April to start building trails in there. That's a small budget for a forest this size, and the reason it can work is that most of the walking route already exists. The longest stretch is an old railbed that a Middleton adhesive plant rebuilt last fall so fire trucks could get in. Phase one adds the pieces that link the Woodlot to that railbed and the railbed to the river.

A Railbed Rebuilt for Fire Trucks

The Salem and Lowell railroad once ran through these woods, and the town's trail map shows a 1.3-mile section of its bed inside Willis Woods. The line used to serve the Bostik plant in Middleton, which makes industrial adhesives for parent company Arkema and has been running for 130 years.

According to the Lynnfield Weekly News, getting emergency vehicles into the woods had been a long-standing problem. The area has had several brush fires and medical calls over the years. Most of Willis Woods lies south of the Ipswich River, and the one bridge across it, in North Reading, can't be certified for heavy equipment. That limited fire crews to going in on foot or in small vehicles.

Bostik worked with the Lynnfield, Middleton and North Reading fire departments on a fix and paid a private paving company to pull up the remaining rail and compact the railbed for heavy vehicles. The path was finished in November 2025 and is open for both emergency access and recreation. In that same Weekly News report, Lynnfield Fire Chief Glenn Davis said the new access "will allow improved safety to the adjacent properties," and Middleton plant manager Paul Caizzi said that "it was an easy yes."

So the trail project starts from a stretch the public can already walk. Rich Kosian of Lynnfield's Open Space and Recreation Working Group described the railbed to the Conservation Commission in March this year, as reported by the Lynnfield Weekly News:

"Which is completely passable now. It should be smoothed out, but it's walkable; people go walking there all the time."

Getting In Today

The town's trail map lists about four miles of existing unimproved trails on three public properties, plus nearly a mile of frontage on the Ipswich River. Those three properties add up to about 591 acres. The rest of Willis Woods is a mix of private and municipal land, including a sizable Bostik parcel in Middleton. Each of the public properties has its own owner and its own character.

The only off-street parking is the Woodlot lot. The town map also lists street parking on Glen Drive and Friendship Lane in Lynnfield and on MacIntyre Drive in North Reading, near the Elm Street (Route 62) entrance.

Most of the acreage belongs to the water district. Its 547 acres of watershed-protection land are open to the public for passive recreation under a revocable agreement between the town and the water district. Walkers are asked to stay on existing trails and keep clear of water supply infrastructure. The Bennett Keenan parcel has been town conservation land much longer. The Conservation Commission discussed naming it in December 1980, and the name was announced in 1981.

The Woodlot itself is fairly new to the public. Greenbelt bought the land, then called Richardson Green, in 2022 to keep it undeveloped and to create an entrance from Main Street. Greenbelt says the property "will eventually provide a gateway" to the wider Willis Woods trails as partners improve and formalize public access.

What the $30,000 Adds

Phase one came out of a setback. Kosian told the Conservation Commission that a grant application for the project was turned down the year before, so the working group went back through earlier proposals from trail design firms to figure out what a first phase could cover. The answer was a short list of connecting trails, paid for through the Department of Public Works' FY27 budget. The Lynnfield Villager reported that the $30,000 covers about 7,500 linear feet of trail.

The town's request for proposals, dated September 23, splits the work into two tiers. Bids were due October 15.

Base work, about 1.46 miles:

• East Line Trail, a loop of about three-quarters of a mile off the Lynnfield Woodlot that connects to the old Salem-Lowell railbed, with bog bridges over wet ground
• Riverside Trail, with a 14-step stairway down a short, steep embankment, completing a loop to the Ipswich River
• South Side Trail, minor maintenance on an existing route

Optional work if funding allows, about 1.5 miles combined:

• Willis Brook Trail, with two bridges spanning about 10 and 22 feet
• Glen Drive Trail, with bog bridges

All five trails, when finished, make up the roughly three-mile network described in the town's October notice, with vegetation cleared, routes marked and signs installed. The base work also needs a wetlands permit application to the Lynnfield Conservation Commission, and the contractor must start within 10 days of a notice to proceed.

On a map, the phase-one routes line up with the problem the railbed left open. The railbed already crosses the woods. East Line connects it back to the Woodlot parking lot, and Riverside connects it to the river. With both built, a walker could start on Main Street, go out along the railbed, reach the Ipswich and loop back on marked trail.

The plan reaches beyond Lynnfield too. The Ipswich River Watershed Association's 2021 vision for Willis Woods, developed with Greenbelt and the Metropolitan Area Planning Council, focuses on the corner where four towns meet. It names possible links to Peabody's Independence Greenway and North Reading's former rail corridor.

A Boulder That Came From the North

Deep in the woods sits a glacial erratic, a large boulder carried here by retreating ice. Members of the working group came across it while scouting a section of Willis Woods in December. Nick Federico identified it. He graduated from Lynnfield High School in 2013, holds a geology degree from UMass Lowell, and is a member of the working group. On the town's news page, he said the rock "could have come from Canada." He added that the way its three rocks sit, it might have served as a shelter for Native Americans or early settlers, which he called "something to hypothesize about."

Last November 16, Federico led a public hike to the boulder. ItemLive covered the walk in "Ice Age Geology in Lynnfield's Willis Woods," and the town republished an excerpt. In it, Federico described the route as a run of "small hills, swamps, streams, and sporadic rocks," all signs that glaciers shaped this ground roughly 10,000 years ago.

The woods' name goes back almost that far in local terms. According to the town's brief history of Willis Woods, it comes from Thomas Willis, who received a 500-acre land grant from Lynn in 1638.

Walking It in November

Late fall is a good time to walk here because the leaves are down and the land is easier to read. A few rules from the town's trail map and town notices apply all year, and one matters most right now:

• Hours: trails are open dawn to dusk, so the useful window gets short this time of year.
• Vehicles and fires: no motorized vehicles in Willis Woods or any Lynnfield conservation area, and no fires.
• Hunting: in a September 30 notice, the town said that with the fall 2026 hunting season underway, hunting is prohibited on all conservation areas and Lynnfield Center Water District properties. The same notice says carrying or firing guns, bows and paintball guns is prohibited on all conservation areas. It asks anyone who sees hunters on town or water district land to call the Massachusetts Environmental Police at 1-800-632-8075.
• Dogs: Greenbelt lists dog walking as an allowed activity at the Lynnfield Woodlot.
• Water district land: stay on existing trails and away from water supply infrastructure.

For a first visit, the easiest start is the Woodlot lot at 1452 Main Street and its marked 0.8-mile loop. From there, the water district's cart paths and the railbed lead toward the river, along the route where East Line and Riverside will go.

At the Marjorie Youngren Team, we follow how Lynnfield's open spaces develop, from the Woodlot loop to the river trails still to come. If you'd like to talk about the town's quieter corners, or what nearby conservation land means for your own street, please contact us.