A year ago I left a tiny Manhattan apartment for sixteen forested acres outside Stockbridge, because I no longer wanted to see, hear or smell my neighbors. I wanted quiet and enough trees that I couldn’t make out another house from mine.
As I explored, I found a wall - low, stone - running through my woods and onto my neighbors’ land in a way that ignored every boundary line on the map. It intrigued me and so I did some 2026-style research. Eventually my snooping led me to the state’s mapping website, where I clicked something called LiDAR, a layer that strips away the trees and shows the bones of the land underneath. And there it all was: a whole network of old walls, my woods stitched to everybody else’s by stone.
