Somewhere in New Jersey

By Geophile


I went through my pictures this evening and found a couple series from sites in New Jersey, as well as a number of photos from the Eckville Terraces. I went to the NJ sites with a woman who grew up there and I was never able to take another 'rock head' there to get more experienced ideas of what I was seeing. Here are a few pictures from a small hillside in Warren County. We saw some elements from the car and found the rest as we walked around.

The first picture is of a low wall that crossed (or once crossed) a small stream. If I went back now I would follow the stream to its spring, which could not have been far away, but I was not so savvy then.
Here's a turn in the wall.


Here the wall is taller and runs along the stream. Note the large strangely-shaped stone near the bottom.What you can't see here is that this was a somewhat lacy wall--in places you could look through it between the stones. I know this is common in other places, but I have never seen it in PA or NJ, before or since. You can see stones in the background. If this was a field clearing wall, the cleared field was nowhere around.


Here's a nice little rock on rock, a little turtlish, maybe. It sat on a face of the hillside, above a rock that faced outward actually making up, in that area, the face of the hill.


Here's that facing rock. I try to take pictures of natural rock features at sites, because they probably contributed to the essence of the site and were likely incorporated into the ritual understanding of the place.


Near the base of the hillside, off to the left of the facing stone, we found this small cave containing a spring that, at that time anyway, was insufficient to flow out. It may have been flowing back underground somewhere inside the cave. The floor was covered with a couple of inches of water.


An interesting spot. I would have to get in touch with Mary and see if she remembered where it was if I wanted to go back. She was trying to take me somewhere else that day--she remembered a place not far from this spot that she and her friends used to call the Castle, with all kinds of strange stone structures. But when we got to where she remembered it, there was just a fairly new house built of stone. We'll never know what the Castle looked like.