Curious waterside structure

Here are some photos Tim Fohl took while we were out on the field trip last weekend - I had run out of memory "film" in my digital camera.

This structure is in Boxborough next to a brook and barely visible from the road as it is covered with downed branches and dead stalks of lucestrife. From up close it looked to me like someone built a stone "U" structure on top of an older pile that was falling down.My friends thought this was another example of a deliberate depression in a mound, which I have argued is often a sign of vandalism rather than of architecture. But here I was arguing that the stone "U" was deliberate and constructed on top of another older pile, not dug down into it. To me this looks nothing like the depressions we were talking about before [Click here]. In this last picture you can make out two different sections of retaining wall. In the foreground, on the left is a bit of the original pile. Slightly to the rear of that and on the right it a bit of the retaiing wall forming the sides of the "U". In truth none of us know much about this. It is unusual but not unknown to find piles this close to the water. There is a big rock pile site across the road from here.