The Beach
Spread across nearly 600 acres (2.4 km2) of barrier beach and salt marsh, Horseneck Beach is one of the most popular facilities in the Massachusetts State Forests and Parks system. Located at the western end of Buzzards Bay, the sandy, southwest-facing, 2-mile (3.2 km) long beach is breezy all year round, providing excellent wind surfing and a dependable respite from sweltering inland temperatures every summer. The combination of ocean beach and estuary habitat makes Horseneck one of the premier birding locations in New England.
There is a campground behind the dunes at Gooseberry Neck, at the Eastern end of the reservation. The campground office hours are 8am–10pm; the regular camping season is from mid-May through mid-October. Swimming is only permitted at designated beaches in the reservation, and pets are not allowed at the main beach but they are allowed at the campground and Gooseberry Island. All the sand dunes are protected-entrance prohibited. From mid-may to August Horseneck is nesting ground for the threatened Piping Plover.
Read more about this topic: Horseneck Beach State Reservation
Famous quotes containing the word beach:
“When the inhabitants of some sequestered island first descry the “big canoe” of the European rolling through the blue waters towards their shores, they rush down to the beach in crowds, and with open arms stand ready to embrace the strangers. Fatal embrace! They fold to their bosoms the vipers whose sting is destined to poison all their joys; and the instinctive feeling of love within their breasts is soon converted into the bitterest hate.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“We often love to think now of the life of men on beaches,—at least in midsummer, when the weather is serene; their sunny lives on the sand, amid the beach-grass and bayberries, their companion a cow, their wealth a jag of driftwood or a few beach plums, and their music the surf and the peep of the beech-bird.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)