Fogg Forest – Norwell, MA
If you’ve driven down RT. 123 through Norwell Center you’ve passed by the Fogg Forest and chances are you may not have even noticed, sometimes I’m distracted by the llamas that live right there too! In 2019/2020 the Fogg Forest went through a bit of a upgrade when a new fence was installed at the entrance and the town acquired the Carleton property, which added an additional 40 acres to the already 100+ acre Forest.
The sign from Main Street in Norwell for the Fogg Forest is a bit confusing, it look me a minute to figure out where to park, but ultimately the deal is pull through the fence all the way down over the grass and you can park towards the the trail head map. Once parked there are a few different ways to start, and all of them are very well marked and pretty easy to follow. We started by walking down the trail marked “F-1” which begins behind the rock that has a plaque dedicated to the Fogg Family who gifted the town of Norwell the Forrest in 1972.
There are five different trails throughout the Forest that you can follow, all labeled with different trail head colors as well as numbering, (F1-F5). Now, since the Carleton property is intertwined you’ll also see signs that say “To the Carleton Trails” along with C1 if you choose to follow that direction. For us, we started off on the F1 trail and veered off to the right to meet up with the F3/F4 trails. This portion of the trail is pretty cool, there are a whole bunch of really nicely constructed foot bridges, some really interesting stone stairs and a couple tree stumps that we of course needed to climb over. From there, we continued down F4 though a few more foot bridges before turning around at Center Street and heading back towards the loop. At the fork in the road where the majority of the trails meet you’ll see a “To Center Street” sign on a pine there which would lead towards the direction you just came from, at this point for us it started to rain so we headed back down the loop towards the parking lot before we cut across over through F5 to continue on through the sprinkling weather. There’s also a great map at the beginning of the trail or you can scroll down below to the one I pulled from the NSWA website.
Map below provided by the North South Watershed Association website:
After looping towards the parking lot we headed back into the woods and ran into the Carleton sign where we walked down for a bit and stumbled upon a creek where the only way we were able to pass over was my hopping over a few rocks which we may or may not have had to cross 115 times. The Fogg Forest is definitely a great, easy trail that I would recommend, I would absolutely not try and bring a stroller on this trail and either default to a carrier or just force your 2 & 3 1/2 year olds to walk so they sleep really well during nap time like I did!
