Enjoy and learn from the open spaces of Tiverton

Open to the public for hiking and enjoyment of nature, Pardon Gray Preserve and Weetamoo Woods offer miles of interconnecting trails. The variety of habitats you will encounter on a walk through them will fascinate and educate.  

The combined open space includes miles of trails that take a walker through a variety of natural habitats. These include a 70-acre grassland, along Main Road, vernal pools, a rare coastal oak-holly forest, and along a portion of an extensive north-south glacial outcrop ridge that characterizes much of the East Bay. Each of these natural habitats is home to a unique community of plants and animals.

Pardon Gray Preserve

The Pardon Gray grassland provides conditions for grassland nesting birds and invertebrate species that thrive in open, or non-forested conditions. Because of the long-term abandonment of farms in New England, many of those animals are in serious decline, so this large open field has great ecological value. Native warm season grasses are being brought back and the mowing that is required to sustain grasslands is being done after the nesting season.

Pools at Pardon Gray Preserve

Vernal pools are fascinating enclosed ecosystems that support an array of insects and amphibians which depend on small water bodies that are full in the spring breeding season but dry up in late summer. Best known for the raucous cacophony of frog mating calls and the dramatic spring migration of salamanders to their shores each spring, they also support many insect species with amazing life cycles and adaptations to aquatic conditions. A lovely vernal pool is at the beginning of the Cemetery Trail, just inside the forest near the edge of the grassland.

Oak and Holly forest

The Coastal oak-holly forest is an uncommon upland hardwood forest of various oak species and American holly trees found only along coastal areas of southern New England. The American holly (Ilex opaca) is the sole broadleaf evergreen tree in the region, with red holly berries that brighten the winter woodland landscape. Along the lower portions of the Ridge Trail is a forested wetland, a black gum – red maple swamp. In the deeper soils along the edges of the swamp towering white, red, and black oaks can be seen, along with yellow and black birch, and some unusually large hickory trees.

The glacial outcrop is parallel to and above the Ridge Trail. This remnant of the glacial recession that occurred 12,000 years ago is mostly granite outcrop, ledge and boulder rubble. Just a few decades ago it was widely known as the home of the last population of eastern timber rattlesnakes in Rhode Island.