The Old Saybrook Trail That Doesn't Exist Yet (And the Ones You Can Walk Today)
August 13, 2026
August 13, 2026
There is a pond behind the Old Saybrook Racquet Club that almost nobody in town has seen. It sits in the middle of fourteen wooded acres off Springbrook Road, six acres of water surrounded by trees, feeding a wetland that eventually becomes Hyde Creek. You cannot walk to it. Not yet. But the Old Saybrook Land Trust is in the middle of buying that parcel right now, and once the deal closes, it will change how the town's trail network fits together, not just how big it is.
That is the part of the story most people miss when they talk about Old Saybrook's trails. The Preserve, Great Cedars, the Crystal Lake loop, these get treated like a finished map, something you print out and follow. They are not finished. They are being assembled, piece by piece, and the piece currently being negotiated tells you something real about how the town thinks about its own water.
According to the Old Saybrook Land Trust (OSLT), the organization has signed a purchase agreement for a 14-acre parcel, Town ID 058-034-0000, currently owned by the Old Saybrook Racquet Club. The club is selling it below what it could likely fetch on the open market specifically so the land does not get developed. The property already has trails cut through it. OSLT plans to expand that existing network and open it to the public once the sale closes, which is currently pending loan financing.
What makes the parcel worth watching isn't the acreage. Fourteen acres is a modest add in a town whose land trusts and conservation partners already manage more than 1,600 acres of forested open space between them. It's the water underneath it. The pond at the center of the property feeds a wetland that forms the headwaters of Hyde Creek, and Hyde Creek flows into Ayer's Point marsh, a property OSLT already owns. The Racquet Club land isn't an isolated add-on. It's the missing upstream piece of a watershed the land trust already protects downstream.
Land trusts don't usually get to choose their acquisitions with this kind of precision. Most conservation deals happen because a landowner is selling, a will requires it, or a grant becomes available. This one is different because the geography does the arguing for itself. If you already hold the marsh at the bottom of a watershed, protecting the headwaters at the top means the whole system, from vernal pool to tidal creek, stays connected under one set of hands.
The parcel also holds a secluded vernal pool and what OSLT describes as several native and relatively rare plants, plus habitat for both resident and migratory birds. None of that shows up on a real estate listing. It shows up on a conservation biologist's checklist, which is exactly the audience this purchase seems built for.
The town has its own stake in this too. Old Saybrook has partnered with its Land Trust to work toward Connecticut's statewide goal of setting aside 21 percent of a municipality's land as protected open space, a target most shoreline towns have struggled to hit given how built out the coast already is. Every parcel like this one moves the needle, and this one moves it in a spot that matters more than its footprint suggests.
None of this means you have to wait for anything to go for a walk this week. Old Saybrook already has a working trail network, most of it free, all of it open dawn to dusk, and it splits into a few distinct pieces worth knowing by name rather than by category.
| Area | Where to Park | What's There | Who Maintains It |
|---|---|---|---|
| The Preserve | Ingham Hill Road | Nearly 1,000 acres spanning Old Saybrook, Essex, and Westbrook, with Blue, Red, Green, and Caleb's Trail segments plus the 2.6-mile Pequot Swamp Pond Trail | Essex Land Trust |
| Great Cedars Conservation Area & Clark Community Park | Off Mill Rock Road West, via Merritt Lane | Includes the Hay House and Great Cedars East Loop, the longest local route at 5.4 miles with 469 feet of elevation gain | Town of Old Saybrook Conservation Commission |
| Crystal Lake Loop (Town Park) | 170 Schoolhouse Road | Blue Trail along the south shore, Red Trail along the west shore, picnic areas and a playground near the lot, swimming not permitted | Old Saybrook Parks & Recreation |
The Preserve is the one worth understanding first, mostly because it is genuinely large by shoreline standards, described by AllTrails as the largest contiguous coastal forest between Boston and New York City. The Pequot Swamp Pond Trail inside it carries a 4.5 star average across 630 community reviews, which for a swamp loop with no ocean view is a notable amount of local affection. Part of that route passes the foundation of the old Ingham home, one of the few visible ruins along any trail in town.
Walk enough of these trails and a pattern shows up. Pequot Swamp drains toward the same tidal system that eventually reaches South Cove. The causeway that carries Route 154 across the cove has its own paved pedestrian path, separated from traffic by a low guardrail, with a few wider pull-offs that locals use for fishing rather than walking. Keep going past the causeway into Fenwick Borough and you reach the Lynde Point preserve, a shoreline walk along South Cove and Long Island Sound that the Lyme Land Trust has run guided hikes through in past seasons.
That whole corridor, from Ingham Hill Road inland to Fenwick on the water, sits on one connected drainage. The Racquet Club pond feeding Hyde Creek is upstream of the same system that eventually reaches the harbor near the old Saybrook Fort site, where a statue of Lion Gardiner marks where the fort's builder and commander once stood watch over the river mouth.
The river itself is having its own working season. The Town of Old Saybrook's most recent construction update notes that the Amtrak Connecticut River Bridge replacement project has kept marine construction active through the channel, with temporary regulatory buoys reinstalled each spring after coming down for winter, and navigation restrictions of 100 feet vertical and 110 feet horizontal currently in effect near the movable span. Further south, the Baldwin Bridge State Boat Launch closed for repairs from May 27 through June 12 of this year, according to CT Examiner. None of that touches the walking trails directly, but it says something about the town right now: the river corridor, on land and on water, is mid-renovation on multiple fronts at once.
You do not need to wait for a ribbon cutting to track what happens with the Racquet Club parcel. OSLT runs a standing program that puts residents inside its own process rather than waiting on a press release.
The land trust has also said a larger down payment could help it secure better loan terms, which means the timeline for public access still depends partly on fundraising. That's worth knowing if you've been telling people the new trail is coming soon. It's coming. Nobody involved is promising a date.
What all of this adds up to is a town that treats its open space the way a good gardener treats a yard: not as a finished layout, but as something you keep extending in the direction the water already wants to go. The pond behind the Racquet Club isn't a new attraction. It's the last unclaimed piece of a system Old Saybrook has been quietly building for years, one headwater at a time.
Teri Lewis has spent decades on this stretch of river, from marina ownership in Essex to the Shoreline towns she still walks and boats through today. If you want the kind of local read that only comes from actually living here, from trail closures to tide tables to which coves fill in fastest after a rain, reach out to Teri Lewis and request a Concierge Consultation.
Stay up to date on the latest real estate trends.
Teri is extremely personable and will work tirelessly for your needs. Her attention to detail and her honest and personable approach is what she longs for each in every transaction. She will not only find you a home, but will also help you find the right fit for your family and also give you a concierge approach when transitioning into the area she so loves.