Sunday afternoon we decided to go to a farm, and chose Historic New England’s Watson Farm on Jamestown. It was a good choice, I think, and perhaps this will be the summer of historic farms and landscapes.

I always wanted to be Tasha Tudor when I was little, live in a historic house, wear historic clothes, eat historic foods, perform historic chores. We lived in a ca. 1875 house in Chicago, so of course I wanted 1875 clothes for my school, which was also ca. 1875, at least in part. Fortunately, I did not get them, children being even less tolerant in the Dark Ages of my youth than they are today.

So Watson Farm’s ca. 1790 date and traditional methods appealed to me, and appealed to Mr. S, who wanted just “farm,” and the Young Mr. was just stuck with the decision.

The farm is largely uninterpreted. HNE provides a brochure and map for a self-guided tour, and there are cows, sheep, chickens, ducks, and cats scattered about the landscape. The fields are pasture, with the farm managers maintaining a vegetable garden for their own use. In terms of learning, it was not a stellar experience and knowing what I do about the farm, I can see why. With 285 acres that need to remain untouched, you can’t plant signs everywhere despoiling the landscape and getting in the way of cattle. In terms of beauty, it was outstanding.

The brochure takes you on a roughly 2-mile walk through the fields and down to the shore of the island. (There is a shorter loop option.) The view was lovely and on Sunday, with weather coming in from the west, the sky was dramatic and it was just about like walking in a Thomas Hart Benton painting.

I think the best moment for me was hearing the cows eat. I don’t remember ever hearing a cow eat grass before, but it was a wonderful sound, “like eating a whole lot of celery, with a pillow over your head,” said Mr. S. Well, sort of. I wish I’d made a recording of it, because it is a sound very few people ever hear anymore. Even the most urban among us can encounter police horses snuffling in their feed bags, and reenactors can visit the dragoon’s horses at battles. But cows snuffling up and chewing grass–that’s another kind of almost-lost sound altogether.

And that’s the whole point of these historic landscapes, preserving the things that would otherwise be lost: not just the vista, the plants and the animals, but the sounds the animals make, the smell of hay toasting in the sun, the sandy prints of burrowing animals, and the truly otherworldly, out-of-time experience of stepping off the asphalt path.