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TheSouthShoreMagazine.com 7 there: you always feel like you have your own space." The panorama from the highest point of World's End might even take your breath away. To the west, the Boston skyline rises 14 miles in the distance. To the east, lie the bouldery shores of Rocky Neck. Kayakers paddle through the Weir River Estuary, the town of Hull, and the whitecaps of the wide-open Atlantic beyond. "No matter how many times you've been there, it's always a great experience just to see all of that in one frame," Marotta says. Those views are millennia in the making. Fifteen thousand years ago, glaciers moved bedrock and loose sediment to carve hills and islands in Boston Harbor. From the air, the four spoon-shaped drumlins that now comprise World's End all point in the direction of the glaciers' retreat. Originally two discrete islands at high tide, colonial farmers connected the southernmost drumlin, Planter's Hill, to the mainland in the 1600s. Around the same time, farmers dammed off the narrow bar between Planter's Hill and World's End proper to grow hay. The effort was worth it, Marotta says: World's End has the best soil in Hingham and, according to town records, commanded the highest prices for land. (The origins of the name remain a mystery, but Marotta suggests—while freely emphasizing that no evidence exists to support the idea—that the World's End moniker might have reflected the lengths to which farmers were willing to travel to reach the property.) In 1855, John Brewer, a Boston businessman, purchased most of the property and turned it into a farming estate. In 1886, he hired Olmsted to design a 163-lot housing subdivision. The homes never came, but the more than four miles of carriage paths carving through pastureland are a remnant of Olmsted's influence. By the middle of the 20th century, the property had passed to Mr. and Mrs. William Walker, the latter of whom was Brewer's granddaughter. As the South Shore suburbanized, the TheSouthShoreMagazine.com Photo by J. Hein