280 Berme Road

The main house stands high enough on its slope that the light comes through the trees most of the day, which is the first thing the listing says about it and the thing the photographs keep proving. Behind that light is a renovation that replaced almost everything: well, roof, siding, windows, doors, driveway, electrical, plumbing, insulation, flooring, paint, fixtures, kitchen, baths and decks.

There are three structures on the 7.8 acres. The main house is 1,456 square feet on one level, three bedrooms and two full baths over a full walk-out basement, with the living, dining and kitchen in one room and a dutch door off the primary bedroom onto a deck with an outdoor shower. The studio is about 340 square feet and finished. The third building, 576 square feet, was damaged by fire and is still to be rebuilt.

The stream has a name on the record: Shingle Gully, with 1,320 feet of frontage in the MLS field. That is a quarter of a mile exactly, which is what the listing means by a quarter mile of cascading waterfall. Shingle Gully comes off the Shawangunk escarpment above the house, out of the same quartz-conglomerate crevices as the Ellenville Fault Ice Caves, which the National Park Service named a National Natural Landmark in 1967.

Berme Road takes its name from a canal bank, and follows the berme side of the Delaware & Hudson Canal, and the D&H Canal Company's own office still stands at 5 Berme Road under a marker that reads: this office “stood on berme of D & H Canal at Lock 31. Closed in 1901. Moved here in 1974.” The railroad that ended the canal left its bed in the same corridor, and the Open Space Institute has been assembling it into the O&W rail trail. A 2.1-mile stretch off Berme Road toward Napanoch was nearing completion in 2023, inside a plan that runs to seventeen miles and an ambition of fifty-seven, Kingston to Port Jervis.

The parcel carries two street numbers, 270 and 280, which is why the aggregators print the address as a unit. It is one lot, 301 by 1,128 feet, irregular, wooded, secluded and adjacent to public land. Built 1970, on a block foundation, frame, electric forced air, well and septic, no garage and a gravel drive. FEMA puts it in Zone X, minimal flood risk, which is worth knowing about a house this close to running water.