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Trails
Narrative Direction: South from Prescott Trailhead When you emerge from the forested area, you enter a series of hayfields. See photo below. 
As you move up the trail a hundred yards or so you come upon one of the very best vistas in the Park which you can see in the photo below. Look to the south over Ballfield Tributary and Little Bennett valleys and you will observe practically nothing but trees for as far as they eye can see. If you look closely, however, in the far distance across the two valleys down below you can barely make out a few homes along Snowden Farm Parkway in the new part of Clarksburg on the other side of the Park. 
As you proceed down the hill, you come to the Tobacco Barn, the profile of which you can see in the photo below. 
A little to the east of the Tobacco Barn are the remnants of a stone foundation of another building that is currently under study by staff from the Park and the Maryland Archeological Society. As you pass by these structures, you gradually switchback your way downward through a large thriving meadow. See the photos below.
When you come to the bottom of the hill, a healthy mature sycamore to your left signals the presence of a feeder stream to Ballfield Tributary which lies ahead. Unfortunately, the sunlit edge of the meadow supports a strand of multiflora that stretches for a couple of hundred yards toward Ballfield. Moving on you come to Ballfield Tributary (an unusual name explained on our Browning Run trail page). Unfortunately, the Park has never installed a bridge over this 15-20 foot wide but shallow section of the creek. Walking stones enable you to cross when the creek is low but many days the creek is too high to use them. This stream crossing is depicted below.
You can see an unusual 5-trunked sycamore as you look to the west along the creek edge. Soon after crossing the creek, you come to the intersection with Browning Run trail as Tobacco Barn Trail begins to climb through an unmown meadow. If hiking southbound, as the trail enters the forest turn for a moment and enjoy the vista of the meadow in the photo below that you have just walked through.
You will next enter the last several hundred forested yards of Tobacco Barn trail as it climbs fairly steeply up the hill as evidenced by several water bars along this stretch of trail. You will soon come to an apparent trail intersection; turn right at this point. There is a sign that says Loggers Trail but it is a directional sign rather than a trailhead sign and you are actually continuing along Tobacco Barn trail. After a couple hundred more yards of forested trail, you come to a 2 or 3 acre grove of mature pine trees which provides a soothing contrast to the hardwood you have been hiking through up to now. As you pass through this pine grove you also encounter Loggers Trail trailhead which proceeds east from this point. The Park recently closed Loggers Trail and will no longer be maintaining it so it is a "pass-at-your-own-risk" effort, and the Park would prefer that it not be used so that it can return to its natural state. Soon you will commence a rather steep decline in Tobacco Barn trail with several more waterbars. At the bottom of the hill, the trail surface shifts to a gravel bed as it proceeds the last 200 yards or so before ending at Western Piedmont Trail. At trail end, observe the large, thick grove of Eastern red cedar pines that lies straight in front of you and continues down Western Piedmont Trail for almost 200 yards.
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