Monday, February 12, 2007

I was looking at the Fort Devens stone wall map (described here), and spotted a place Boxborough with irregular stone walls in a place I had missed examining previously. So I figured out how to get there and it was my first destination Saturday. I parked and walked into the woods. For a while it was all torn up with bulldozed areas, sandpits, and trash. But I walked further in and eventually got to an area with a few rock piles. Here is a small wetland - source of a brook - enclosed by stone walls:
To the left is a knoll facing west. There are a few rock piles on it. Here is one.
Note the quartz, in this detail shot:
Here are two views of another.
This is the first substantial pile I have found in several weeks. You can see these are both supported piles, at the top of the knoll and facing west over the brook as it curves around the base of the knoll.

A few yards further along were a few piles on a slope, like the remnants of a marker pile site.
This last one looks like it was vandalized very recently. There were a couple of others like it and I thought there were traces of someone having driven over them deliberately with some kind of ATV.

So this is hardly a huge site. Just a bit of relatively undisturbed woods. In Boxborough you can almost always find things in relatively undisturbed woods. As I wandered around, here was a substantial pile right behind a house:
I noticed a few other odds and ends: what looked like a "gateway" pile, a ground pile here, a false outcrop there.

Returning to the spot were I photo'd the panorama above, there was a rock pile at my feet:
And also this old friend, a nice example of a split-wedged rock:
No doubt this whole area was once filled with ceremonial structures. A few are still left in there.

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