Not a private retreat. An active experiment — in off-grid living, land stewardship, and new models of human relationship with a threatened landscape. The cabin is the heart. The land is the work. The community is still forming.
The cabin is called Paradise — not ironically, and not naively. It is paradise in the oldest sense: a beloved place, tended with care, returned to with joy. But paradise here is not ease or escape. It is the name you give a place that asks something of you and gives more back. A proving ground can be a paradise of sorts — if you understand that the proving is the point.
The question this property is trying to answer is practical and urgent: What does it look like to live lightly on land you love, in full knowledge of what is coming for it? Not to escape to wilderness. Not to own and develop. But to inhabit — carefully, actively, with attention — a place that is teaching you something if you're willing to be taught.
The property is off-grid by intention. The cabin runs on what falls from the sky and what the sun provides. The trails are maintained by human hands. The invasive species are pulled out by human hands. The chanterelles are found by people who have learned to look. This is not primitive — it is a different kind of sophisticated.
Solar power, rainwater, woodstove. Paradise Cabin demonstrates that comfortable habitation doesn't require grid infrastructure — and that the effort of providing for yourself changes your relationship to what you consume.
Trail maintenance, invasive species removal, ecological observation, responsible foraging. The land is tended, not just visited. The work is part of the relationship, not separate from it.
The property is a site for gathering — of people who want to practice new ways of living, who want to learn from a specific place, who want to bear witness alongside others rather than alone.
Each named place on the property has a character and a history. These are not arbitrary labels — they reflect something real about what each place is and what it offers.
The off-grid cabin at the center of the property. Solar-powered, wood-heated, rainwater-fed. The place where the day begins and ends, where the fire is lit, where people gather after a day on the land. Simply built and genuinely comfortable — what comfort feels like when you've earned it.
The main meadow adjoining Paradise Cabin — open, south-facing, sheltered enough from the north wind to warm pleasantly in summer. Wild blueberries carpet the ground in August. The chanterelles appear at the meadow's forest edge. A place of abundance, if you know where to look and what to look for.
The name is earned. This coastal meadow sits at the property's outermost reach, where the spruce gives way to salt-wind heath and the Atlantic stretches unbroken to the horizon. Nothing between you and Portugal. The place to come when you need the full weight of the ocean to reorient you.
The remains of an earlier habitation — stone foundation walls, the unmistakable depression of a root cellar, and the cultural landscape of a family that lived here and is no longer named on any map. Possibly connected to the island's Black Loyalist land grants of 1783. The site is treated with care and respect.
Somewhere between 100 and 200 years old, this apple tree is a survivor — twisted by salt wind, productive in good years, wholly improbable in this landscape. Someone planted it. That act of planting, of imagining future abundance, is one of the things this property is trying to continue in its own way.
Where the property meets the open coast, granite ledges drop to the intertidal zone. At low tide, a different world — starfish, sea anemones, periwinkles, and the occasional great blue heron standing with the patience of someone who has nowhere better to be. These edges are the property's most dynamic places.
Hover over landmarks to learn more. Trails are shown as dashed lines. The property sits on the island's western shore, with frontage on the channel and coastal headlands on the outer edge.
The property's trails are maintained by hand — cleared in spring, walked throughout the season, kept open through care rather than machinery. Each route has a character and a purpose.
From Paradise Cabin, the main trail runs south and east through mixed spruce-fir forest toward Lighthouse Road, eventually connecting to the island's main artery. The route passes through the oldest forest on the property and offers the best chanterelle foraging in late August. The trail emerges at Lighthouse Road near the approach to the gun battery.
A loop through the property's interior, beginning and ending at Paradise Cabin, passing through Arcadia Meadow, the Old Homestead site, and returning through the northern forest. The best trail for daily walks — variable, sheltered, and full of the small discoveries that reward repetition: fungi, bird activity, the changing light through the canopy.
The short trail from Arcadia Meadow to the Ends of the Earth Meadow — across the open heath to the coastal headlands. In wind, it can feel extreme. In calm, it is sublime. The trail ends at the property's outermost granite ledge, where seals haul out at low tide and the lobster boats pass close enough to wave at.
A short connector linking the Arcadia Loop to the Old Homestead and the ancient apple tree. Part of the trail follows what appears to be an older track — the kind of compaction that builds up over generations of use. The apple tree is worth the walk in any season, but in spring bloom and in autumn fruit it is genuinely extraordinary.
Camp on the property. Walk the trails. Learn what lives here. The proving ground is only proven by people doing the work.