Today’s walk provides a lot of support that my motivation for walking every street to find the hidden gems is in fact worthwhile.  Certainly, I expect that some walks are not going to be terribly interesting, and I scheduled a pilot walk in Hamburg including part of it’s northern boundary on Winchester Road simply to see how bad it would be.  Instead, I turned out some of the most interesting things to date.

I parked in a far corner of a parking lot and headed towards Sir Barton, then along Winchester Road, basically along a culvert.  Nearing Grey Lag, I saw a sidewalk appear, leading from the shopping area along Sir Barton and Winchester to a park in the middle of the block.  If one slipped off the path, however, you would discover a trail leading into the woods.

Following the trail for a short distance uncovered an old foundation wall, and the path continued from there.  I headed back to my scheduled route, but found the allure of the hidden park too much to ignore, so I spent some extra time walking through it as well.  I was more than a little surprised to find out that the park was centered on a horse cemetery, part of Hamburg Farms.

I headed back to my route and eventually passed the front of the horse cemetery again on the Sir Barton side, where it is clearly labeled. This may well be something that long-time Lexingtonians are well aware of, but I was surprised to find that this horse cemetery was in plain sight along a street I’ve driven down dozens of times.

I thought this walk nicely demonstrated a couple of points, one about the hidden gems of the urban fabric and another about the impact of pace on what we can allow ourselves to see in our built environment.