Friday, January 20, 2006

A small site by a brook

During the commute there are lots of nice looking woods visible along the highway and my plan is to leave work a little early on Friday afternoons and explore what I can. One place that looked intriguing was where a brook comes down to the road in a shallow valley through what looks like undisturbed woods. I get a quick glimpse of this from the car as I pass. [The brook is shown as a pale blue line in the above map fragment.] Today I left work, drove to a place near this woods, parked behind a new building, walked eastward, and thought it looked like old woods and old ground cover. I crossed a wall and went down to the brook and things looked even more un-disturbed. A split rock across the stream caught my eye and when I got over to it, I was in a small rock pile site.
This is a typical split-wedged rock. You can think what you want about it. I think the rock looks deliberately split - you can see where someone whacked it.

Nearby there were numerous rock-on-rocks.
In all, there might have been more than 10 rock-on-rocks nearby.

Also there were a few inconspicuous ground piles and a few supported ones.
I have a soft spot for cedar trees growing next to rock piles; especially when there is some death symbolism nearby, such as the white quartz rock in the pile shown here. I am suspicious that perhaps cedar trees were planted as memorials; not for burials but for reminders.

Here we are on the eastern side of the brook looking back to the west at the sun which is low in the sky at a few minutes to four on a January afternoon.

Down closer to the brook there were some piles made with larger stones more of a sense of crude alignments. A curious feature near the original split wedged rock was what looked like a fire circle, lined up with a row of cobbles, and another rock pile structure.

[I'm having trouble posting more pics, I'll try again later]

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