A hike usually asks you to look down at your feet and out at the horizon. On the afternoon of October 20, 2026, The Last Green Valley is asking walkers in Chaplin to do something else as well: listen. The organization's Wander & Ponder series pairs a guided walk with poetry and literary excerpts, and this installment at Garrison Park and the adjoining Hubbard Sanctuary is part of that series.
The event runs from 1 to 3 p.m. and is free. It is one of hundreds of listings in the 36th annual Walktober, The Last Green Valley's fall celebration of the National Heritage Corridor, which this year runs from September 19 to November 8. Walktober has grown into a regional institution: the organization says its events draw more than 120,000 people each year, and 15,000 printed guides go out to more than 250 locations around the region and beyond.
The Wander & Ponder concept is a newer wrinkle on that formula. Rather than a naturalist pointing out ferns or a historian recounting who built the stone walls, each hike in the series is led by readers from the TLGV community, who supply the words that accompany the walk. The 2025 guide describes the series as beginning with a kickoff hike featuring sunset-themed readings and a Robert Frost poem, and notes that the Harringtons, as Mr. and Mrs. Walktober, would lead a stroll around a pond on a fully accessible trail while the group learned about local plants. The Chaplin walk follows the same spirit: a walk with a text in hand, or at least in ear.
The setting rewards attention. Garrison Park is Chaplin's town park, a roughly 40-acre property that includes a quarter-mile crushed-stone walking track, ball fields, pavilions, playscapes and a disc golf course, and it was dedicated to Edward Garrison in 1974. Garrison served as Chaplin's first selectman from 1955 to 1973, a tenure that spanned the era when the interstate highway system and suburban sprawl began pressing on eastern Connecticut's small towns.
The larger draw for hikers is what lies alongside the park. Hubbard Sanctuary was donated to Joshua's Trust, the regional land conservation organization, by Mollie Hubbard in 1985. Her parents had bought the property in the 1930s and farmed it for many years, and Mollie herself was a member of the Natchaug Ornithological Society who worked at the University of Connecticut as a scientific illustrator, a career spent rendering the natural world in fine detail. The sanctuary covers 31.1 acres. Next to it is Agnes' Pasture, a 12.5-acre addition acquired from Agnes Fuller in 2011.
Together the parcels make up a varied landscape for a two-hour walk. A 1.3-mile yellow-blazed trail runs through Garrison Park, loops up through Agnes' Pasture and into Natchaug State Forest, passing an open hayfield, two ponds, young forest and mature mixed hardwood stands. Joshua's Trust notes that the preserves help maintain the peaceful character of Chaplin's historic village and provide scenic vistas around the town park, and that their mixed habitats support a wide range of bird and animal life. The trust also partners with a local farmer to manage the 15-acre hayfield for bobolinks and Savannah sparrows, two declining species of grassland-nesting songbirds that build their nests on the ground and raise their young from early May through August. Visitors are advised to wear blaze orange during hunting season, which runs September through January on the neighboring state land.
That mix of habitats, from open grass to deep woods, is a fitting backdrop for a walk built around reading aloud. The Last Green Valley National Heritage Corridor itself is defined by a similar contrast. Congress designated the 35-town region, 26 towns in Connecticut and nine in Massachusetts, as a national heritage corridor in recognition of its character: 1,100 square miles drained by the Quinebaug and Shetucket rivers, with forest and farmland making up 77 percent of its 695,000 acres. At night, the organization notes, the region appears distinctively dark from the air amid the glow of the Boston-to-Washington corridor, which is how it came by its name.
Chaplin sits squarely inside that corridor, a small town whose historic village the Hubbard land helps keep open and quiet. For two hours on an October afternoon, the Wander & Ponder walk asks participants to take that in slowly, with a poem between the ponds and the pasture. It is free, and it is open to anyone willing to walk a mile and a quarter and listen.