Outer Lands
The Outer Lands is the prominent terminal moraine archipelagic region off the southern coast of New England in the United States. This eight-county region of Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and New York, comprises the peninsula of Cape Cod and the islands of Nantucket, Martha's Vineyard, the Elizabeth Islands, the Narragansett Bay Islands, Block Island, Long Island, and Staten Island, as well as surrounding islands and islets.
Though the existence of an arc or chain of islands in this archipelago is widely acknowledged by geographers, it is rarely given a specific name; occasionally a descriptive term such as southern New England islands or a technical term such as Cape Cod/Long Island ecoregion or Long Island-Cape Cod Coastal Lowland is used. The Isles of Stirling was the name granted in 1635 when the islands came into the possession of William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling. "Outer Lands" is a term popularized by author Dorothy Sterling in her 1967 natural history guide of the same name, and used by later natural history authors such as Patrick J. Lynch.