Wednesday, February 22, 2006

Lunenburg Boulder - from Norman Muller

You may remember reading in Manitou about a perched rock in Lunenburg which, the authors say, was quarried in one place and then lifted 10 feet or so and perched on a ledge above. Norman Muller got Mavor to tell him how to find the rock, searched it out and took some great pictures. Here you can see the rock and, below, where the rock came from. You can see it would fit exactly into place. [Actually I may have that wrong, based on what Norman writes below.]

Now here is a side view:
Here is what Norman has to say:

Last summer I sought out the Lunenburg, MA, pedestaled boulder that Jim Mavor had written about in Manitou, and with a map he provided to me, I managed to find it, but not without difficulty. Early summer is not the best time to look for stone features in the woods.

The boulder is wedge-shaped and is supported at two points by two small stones and a portion of the ledge it sits on; it must weigh several tons, given its size and thickness. It is quite obvious that it must have been quarried from an area just to the left of it and about three feet below. There are no drill marks on the side of the large slab, which appears to be a type of gneiss, nor could I see any channels on the area where it was extracted, although there are three vertical parallel marks on the quarry wall that look like drill marks but are not, as one can see in one photo. The entire ledge outcrop is split into huge slabs of stone, as is evident in one of the photos, and these cracks appear to be natural and not enhanced in any way. Obviously the Lunenburg boulder (should one call it a table rock?) has been placed, but for what reason? I keep thinking that it is not that old, but reason tells me that there is no practical purpose why it was laboriously pried out of the ledge and lifted up to be placed on small boulders. There is no habitation site nearby that I was aware of, and I can only conclude that this predates the colonial period.

Here is the site

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