Sunday, February 26, 2006

A perfect small site in Acton

Not too far from the horse stable and big piles mentioned in the previous post, there is a south-facing rock pile site which icorporates an aperature pile, several marker piles with "pointer" rocks, what could be a broken down viewing platform, a number of subtle and delicate features which are undamaged and in place. I took my friend from Carlisle and he was impressed with how everything is still in place. None of the piles seem damaged and the site appears to be pretty recent. This is a site I found a couple of summers ago. So I wanted to show it to my friend. Let's take a look.

Here is what I interpret as a broken down platform pile.
If you stand near this pile, all the other piles are visible as features on a near horizon. You can see an aperture pile:
I don't try to measure alignments accurately but the view through the hole is towards the southwestern horizon.

Also, from the central location, you can also see this marker pile with pointer rock.
Again, viewing from the central location, looking a bit more westerly, you see several minor pointer rocks (the kind that get interpreted as turtle heads). Each pointer marking a slightly different position of the far horizon.I was out of "film" in my digital camera and needed to erase shots from Chelmsford in order to make room for these. In the last picture we are viewing along the left side of an outcrop. There were several more delicate arrangements on this outcrop. Friend from Carlisle says: "these are birds". We both notice some little curved line arrangements of small rocks, highlighted in the snow, but I had not film left for that.
Exploring a bit further downhill, there were some outlying features like this "manitou stone". I had to photo that.

So I think this is a sky-watchig site. It has all the features except noticeable inter-pile alignments, which I have come to expect - aperatures, platforms, lines of site past marker piles with pointer rocks.
Leaving, we discussed the age of the site. It is still in good condition, so perhaps the site is no more than 100 years old. There is also a trash dump at the site. This could be "offerings" or could just be a dump. Some of the trash in the dump seemed 19th century to me. I'll hunt up the pictures I took previously.

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