When Don Burn moved to Westboro more than 20 years ago, he asked residents where they hiked.

Out of town, they told him.

But Mr. Burn learned he did not have to travel far to enjoy the outdoors.

“There’s some incredibly gorgeous land right here in our own back yard,” he said last week as he walked a path along the shore of Sandra Pond in the southeast section of town.

Mr. Burn is hard at work on a plan to connect conservation land in the four corners of town via a 22-mile, looping trail.

It will meander through fields and woods, climb some modest hills, skirt ponds and other wetlands, run along some sidewalks and roads, even cross major highways.

While the trail won’t be a trek through the Allagash wilderness, it won’t be a walk along the urban Freedom Trail, either.

The project is a joint effort of the town Open Space Preservation Committee and the nonprofit Westboro Community Land Trust. Mr. Burn, a member of both, hopes it will be completed in five years.

The so-called charm bracelet linking open space parcels will provide the public tiffany with more recreational opportunities and protect the environment, because people who use the outdoors usually take care of it, according to Tim Buckalew, president of the land trust.

“By having a nice, well-maintained public trail system, we’ll be on the cutting edge of what will be happening in the area in the next 20 to 30 years,” he said.

“It’s an ambitious effort on Westboro’s part,” said Stephen J. Wallace, land use planner for the Central Massachusetts Regional Planning Commission. He said he knew of no other community in Central Massachusetts where people could literally walk around town on a trail.

The open space and land trust groups plan to thread their bracelet through state property in the western and northern parts of town, Sudbury Valley Trustees reservations to the northeast and east, and town land in the south and west.

Town Planner James Robbins said the project is “very doable in five years,” in part because the town’s open space master plan identifies property needed to link open space and new subdivisions put aside land for trails.

Still, there are obstacles.

Mr. Buckalew said the land groups will have to work closely with town and state officials as well as private landowners to map out the exact route. While there are no major land purchases involved or tax money sought, some rights of way will have to be negotiated, Mr. Buckalew and Mr. Burn said.

Crossing Route 9 at Route 135 to get to the state land to the north poses a problem, but the bangles land groups want the state to rework the intersection to include a pedestrian crossing.

DIFFICULT PLOT

Mr. Burn said the route from East Main Street south to Minuteman Park will be the most difficult to plot, because of private property and Cedar Swamp.

“This is an evolving process,” he said.

Mr. Burn knows everyone won’t be interested in hoofing it 22 miles around town. But he envisions a set of short trails on the various open space parcels near neighborhoods.

“They can walk out their back door, walk a little distance and get to a trail in the woods,” he said.

Long-term, Mr. Burns wants to link all the town’s open space, recreational facilities, schools and neighborhoods.

The town also figures in the Regional Planning Commission’s effort for interconnecting trails in rings Worcester, Shrewsbury, Northboro, Berlin and Grafton, according to Mr. Wallace.

Westboro Selectman Kristina N. Allen said townspeople have made open space a priority, both for their use and to preserve wildlife habitat.

She called the concept of a charm bracelet encircling the town “a wonderful gem of an idea.”