Clipboard in hand, Hopkinton Selectman Steve Lux went on an 8-mile hike Sunday. He was joined by Amy Patenaude and Bob Garrison, representatives from Henniker, and together they strolled through woods, scrambled up hills, and wound their way around pounds, eventually tracing the border between their two towns.
The group was fulfilling one of New Hampshire’s oldest and strangest municipal obligations – perambulation.
An import from England, the practice has been on the books in what is now New Hampshire since 1651, when the Granite State was just a part of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Now codified as RSA 51, the state law requires selectmen – or their appointees – to physically walk their town lines every seven years, noting the place and condition of the monuments that dot their borders.
Sunday’s hike was initiated by Henniker – by law, the oldest town on a border must initiate the process. Garrison, an amateur cartographer, was tapped by the select board to fulfill the town’s centuries-old obligation, one it hadn’t made good on in two decades.
Patenaude, an avid hiker, decided to come along as Henniker’s second representative, and Mary Current, a friend of Garrison’s from Milton, briefly joined the hike.
“This is fun for us,” Patenaude said Sunday.
Before Hopkinton, Garrison had already officially perambulated the Bradford, Warner and Weare borders with Henniker. Only Deering and Hillsboro are left (a representative from both towns must be present for the hike) although Garrison has already walked the full border by himself, flagging the trees on the route and monuments with neon pink tape.
A report must be prepared for each border shared between towns – 589 in total – and signed off by officials on both sides of the line. (Technically, there are 624 borders. But the balance of those lines are made up of bodies of water, and as state archivist Brian Burford wryly noted in a history of perambulation written for the New Hampshire Municipal Association, there have been no “recent attempts to walk on water.”)
While perambulation is a long tradition in New Hampshire, so is noncompliance with the law. At least since 1969, when state law started requiring towns to submit their reports to the secretary of state’s office, the number of towns doing so has hovered around 16 percent, Burford said.
Report submissions briefly spiked after the state’s archivist at the time, Frank Mevers, in frustration sent noncompliant towns a letter urging them to comply. But the uptick never stuck.
And that’s a shame, Burford argues, because perambulation, while archaic, isn’t irrelevant – even in the era of Google Maps.
A big part of perambulating is actually finding the bounds – or monuments – that trace the border along the way. They’re often granite posts, chiseled with a date, sometimes a sign – occasionally simply a large boulder on the ground, painted with a mark.
“You actually have to see that the bound is there. And in doing so, it perpetuates where the town’s jurisdiction is,” Burford said.
Within just 10 minutes of starting their trek through the woods Sunday, the Hopkinton-Henniker group would find an unrecorded bound – a granite post, leaning slightly, dated 1913.
“They clearly didn’t walk the line,” Lux said, leafing through his town’s previous report.
In defending perambulation, Burford frequently points to Milford, whose select board in 2005 pushed for a bill doing a way with the nearly 400-year-old law. That same year, a surveyor found several homes near the Milford-Amherst line weren’t in the town they thought they were. It took an act of the state Legislature to redraw the boundaries and clear up the situation.
Or, he notes a 2015 lawsuit, brought against Middleton and Wakefield by a man whose property straddles the two towns, demanding the municipalities re-do their perambulations. John Fournier had deliberately built his home in Middleton, and claimed in his suit that a 2009 perambulation had, by relying on a GPS, mistakenly put his home in Wakefield.
“In order to understand your liabilities, you sort of have to understand the parameters,” Burford said.
For Lux, who volunteered to perambulate even before he joined the select board, it’s about history.
“It’s tradition and I believe in tradition quite a bit,” he said.
And it’s also about the fact that without the work of maintenance – of rooting around in the woods, uprighting falling monuments and keeping careful records – history gets blurry.
“All of it gets lost,” he said.
(Lola Duffort can be reached at 369-3321 or lduffort@cmonitor.com.)