What's with Gungywamp? Tucked in the woods inland from the harbor is one of the strangest-looking places in Connecticut — a hundred-acre site of stone chambers, old foundations, and a double ring of laid stones called Gungywamp, now a State Archaeological Preserve. Because the chambers are low and stone-roofed, and because one of them catches a shaft of sunlight through a small opening at the equinox, the site has drawn a century of romantic theories — Irish monks, Norse voyagers, ancient astronomers. The archaeology tells a quieter story: Native people used this land for thousands of years, and the stone structures themselves are colonial-era — root cellars that worked like early refrigerators, and a double stone circle that was almost certainly a mill for grinding bark or grain. The equinox light through the chamber window is real, and genuinely lovely; the lost civilization is not. Gungywamp is Groton's reminder that the most interesting history is usually the true one.
Groton's stories run to the water. The town took its name from Groton, the Suffolk manor of John Winthrop, who led the founding of the Massachusetts Bay Colony; the river it sits on, the Thames, is named for London's — though locals say it plainly, "Thaymes," not the English way. They'll tell you Groton built more than seventy submarines for the fleet in a single world war, and that for decades the new boats slid down the ways straight into the Thames, the way the Nautilus did in 1954. Down at Fort Griswold every September, the town still gathers to remember the men who fell in 1781. The harbor that made Groton a target in the Revolution is the same deep water that made it the Submarine Capital of the World — the whole story turns on that one stretch of river.
Why People Visit Groton Connecticut
- Tour the free Submarine Force Museum and step aboard the Historic Ship Nautilus, the world's first nuclear submarine, berthed on the Thames.
- Walk the ramparts of Fort Griswold Battlefield State Park and climb the 135-foot Groton Monument for views over the harbor.
- Hike or bike the wooded trails of Bluff Point State Park out to its tidal coves and rocky point.
- Visit Avery Point — the Branford House mansion, the University of Connecticut campus lawns, and Avery Point Light, the last lighthouse built in Connecticut.
- Relax at Eastern Point Beach, a small family cove with breakwater views across the river mouth.
- Take a guided tour of the Gungywamp State Archaeological Preserve to see its colonial stone chambers and double stone circle.
