Monday, April 03, 2006

Monroe County Cairn Field

By Geophile

Apologies if some of these pictures look peculiar. Something is wrong with the CD they've been stored on.

Monroe County, including the area known as the Poconos, is rich with rock piles. They often occur in large areas or fields of many close together. The pictures below are from one site. I counted 34 full rock piles on this site, not including those that were badly broken down or those that must have been destroyed when the road was built through the middle. Walls surrounded parts of the site.

The rock piles pictured below were all on one side of the road. They varied from tall and squarish

to lower and concave on top

many built on boulders

in various states of repair.

An interesting feature I found among the rock piles was a flat, possibly shaped stone

propped up on a small boulder, possibly pointing somewhere.

These rock piles were in a low area, one that might be swampy in wet weather. Is it likely that people were buried in such an area? I don't know.

In my next posts I will show a few more rock piles from this site as well as some features from the slope above them.

2 comments :

pwax said...

A neat site. We do not have them like this around Concord MA, possibly because there are no flat rocks like the ones stacked in these piles. I found the shaped rock-on-rock interesting. For one thing you can see the concave flake scars on the surface of the rock. Second, I sort of recognize the shape and have observed that this shape tends to occur in pairs - might there be another rock nearby with this shape?

Geophile said...

There may be another, if that section of the site still exists. It had been bought by a congregation intending to build a church, so all may be gone. If I can get up there to see it one of these days, I'll look for another stone like that.