Thursday, May 03, 2007

Rock piles and headwaters of Mulpus Brook, Lunenburg, MA

I stepped off the road and went a few steps up along the side of a tributary to Mulpus Brook and saw this:
The brook trickled quietly and I thought I was in a rock pile site. This seemed even more true as I came to new rock piles:They looked more and more pile like:
But then I saw piles scattered around made from rocks of different sizes:And this nice one made from much larger rocks:
This kind of sorting suggests field clearing stages - first the largest rocks are removed then the smaller ones. The way piles were dropped around suggested they might correspond to wagonloads of rocks:Also this place, wet though it was, was on pretty level ground contguous with a more cleared area which could have been a field. So I cannot be sure. These might be "agrarian" non-ceremonial piles. I could get a better idea if I walked up other tributaries of Mulpus Brook, which I hope to do sometime in the future.

2 comments :

Unknown said...

Just wanted to let you know that these rock piles might well be property markers. I just found my 6th great grandfathers will. He lived in Lunenburg and in his will there are lots of mentions of rock piles when they were inventorying his land. Just fyi. He owned land on Mulpus Brook. Had a gristmill.

pwax said...

Cool. I only saw this comment long after it was written. I wish "Unknown" would send an image of the will.