Don’t Miss The Moors On Visit To Nantucket

Historic Nantucket is found in town, but natural Nantucket is found everywhere else, especially in the heath that rolls across the center of the island.

Locals call this area the moors. A few sticklers for accuracy call it the heath. The words are not quite interchangeable. British isle moors are boggy, treacherous to the walker. Heath is dry, wind blown, and vegetation is sparse - grasses, low blackberry bushes, scrub oak, wildflowers. Nantucket’s moors are really heath.

The Nantucket heath forms one-third of all heathland in North America. They are Nantucket. The island unfolds from them. Pack a picnic and walk, bike or drive the 4 miles from town to the moors. If you stick only to town and beach, you’ll have missed Nantucket.

Nantucket is glacial jetsam. It emerged from under the last retreating late Pleistocene era glacier around 30,000 years ago. As the glacier receded it dropped its sand and rocks into a pile. The moors gained a tenuous hold on the glacial residue and never let go.

The glacier also left behind numerous kettle ponds - big dents in the ground that were first filled by huge melting chunks of ice. Kettle ponds dot the moors. Cold rains fill them each spring. Heron and egrets and baby ducks cruise their surfaces; osprey build nests in tall trees nearby. Reeds grow at the edge and bob and dip in the steady wind. The ponds lay hidden in the moors and offer sanctuary to birds and hikers alike.

The moors are stark, lonely, silent. At night they sleep like the dead, still and cold.

I first walked the moors almost 30 years ago. From almost any vantage I could see the world’s largest cranberry bog, the coast, steeples. But well-intentioned conservationists have allowed the scrub oak to take over in the name of preservation. In fact, the Indians burned the land regularly, the early settlers grazed their sheep there. It’s not meant to be forest. The birds can’t see the ground to hunt, the sun can’t reach the ground to germinate grasses and flowers.

The moors are changing, maybe even dying. See them before they are gone.