Tupancy Links Never Closes to Dogs. Here's Why the Rest of the Cliff Does.

Friday morning, a small group gathered at the gravel lot off Cliff Road where Tupancy Links begins, dogs on leads, coffee in hand, waiting for a Nantucket Conservation Foundation naturalist to start the walk. This is the Foundation's recurring Weekly Walks program, and the Aug. 28 session covered the property's history and its slow transformation from golf course to open grassland. Nobody there needed directions. Most of them live within a few blocks and have been walking this ground on their own for years.

What they may not have connected, standing in that lot, is why this particular 73 acres behaves so differently from almost everything else the Conservation Foundation protects. Right now, at Eel Point, Coatue, or Haulover, a dog that wandered onto the sand would be turned back, no matter how well behaved. At Tupancy, nobody blinks. That difference isn't a quirk of enforcement. It's written into what kind of land each property actually is, and understanding it tells you more about how this stretch of the island works than any trail map does.

Two Kinds of Protected Land

The Conservation Foundation stewards more than 9,000 acres across Nantucket, and not all of it is protected for the same reason. Some of it exists to shelter nesting shorebirds. Some of it exists because a family decided a piece of open ground shouldn't become house lots. Tupancy Links falls firmly into the second category, and that distinction is the whole reason it plays by different rules than its neighbors.

The Foundation's own visitor guidelines are direct about where dogs are restricted: Eel Point, Coatue, and Haulover are closed to dogs every year between April 1 and September 15, specifically to protect nesting shorebirds and their chicks during breeding season. Those three properties sit on barrier beach and dune habitat, the kind of ground where a loose dog can flush a nest in seconds. Tupancy Links carries no such restriction, in any season, because there's no comparable habitat to protect. It's recovering grassland on the footprint of a former nine-hole course, not a shorebird nursery.

That's the mechanism a lot of residents walk past without registering. The rule isn't about the Foundation being stricter or looser depending on the property. It's about what's actually living there.

The Golf Course That Became a Grassland

Tupancy Links sits between Nantucket Harbor and Cliff Road, and its name comes directly from the family that shaped its second life. The course operated as Nantucket's first golf club starting in 1921, later expanded from nine holes to eighteen, and closed to play in 1953. Sallie Gail Harris Tupancy and her husband, who had run the course, donated the land to the Conservation Foundation not long after, specifically to keep it from being developed.

The Foundation's own description of the property, used in its walk listings, puts it plainly: the site tells "the transition from private golf course to recovering grassland" and its role in restoring habitat across the island. That transition is still visible if you know what you're looking at. The open, rolling character that made it a golf course in 1921 is the same character that makes it good grassland habitat today. Nobody had to reshape the land to protect it. They just stopped mowing it for a different purpose.

That history also explains the traffic pattern. A former golf course has wide sightlines and gentle grades, which is part of why it draws dog walkers, birders, and anyone looking for an easy loop with a view, rather than the more technical walking you get on Sanford Farm or Squam Farm elsewhere on Foundation land.

What Changes on September 15

If you own a dog on or near Cliff Road, the calendar matters more than the map right now. Here's where each nearby Foundation property currently stands, and when that changes.

That reopening date is about two and a half weeks out from today. For anyone who has been driving to Eel Point out of habit and turning around at the trailhead sign, the workaround has been sitting a short walk from Cliff Road the entire time. Tupancy was never on the restricted list to begin with, because there was never a nesting season to protect there.

The Foundation's own programming that same week made the contrast plain. On August 25, the group ran a Tidal Trek walk built entirely around migratory shorebirds elsewhere on the island. Two days later, the Tupancy walk covered golf course history and grassland restoration. Same organization, same week, two entirely different reasons for the land to exist.

Where the Path Actually Goes

Tupancy Links isn't an isolated stop. The entrance sits directly on the Cliff Road bike path, a route that runs roughly two miles and connects toward the Madaket Road path, making it one of the more direct ways off Cliff Road without a car. A few things worth knowing if you're building a weekend loop around it:

• The parking lot at the Tupancy entrance is the easiest access point, and it sits right where the bike path runs past.
• From there, the path continues toward Steps Beach, reached by a steep staircase down from a viewing platform near the end of Lincoln Circle, with the Cliffside Beach Club visible just to the right at the bottom.
• Keep going and the same corridor eventually reaches Dionis, on the north shore, a longer ride but still mostly on dedicated path.
• On clear nights through mid-September, bioluminescent organisms are occasionally visible in the shallow water off Steps Beach, a detail locals tend to know and visitors rarely do.

None of this requires a car, and none of it requires waiting for September 15. That's part of what makes Tupancy the anchor of the loop rather than a detour from it. It's the one piece of the chain that's never closed.

The guided walks will likely keep running on their weekly schedule through the fall, and the Foundation's event calendar is the place to check exact dates before you go. But the property itself doesn't need a scheduled walk to be worth the trip. It's open every day the sun is up, with or without a naturalist explaining the golf course that used to be there.

If you already know this ground well enough to walk it without thinking, that's the whole point of living here. And if a conversation about Cliff Road ever turns from where you walk the dog to what the house next door is actually worth, Jen Shalley Allen is the person on this street who can tell you, with the same attention to the details that don't show up in the listing photos. Start the Conversation.