Thursday, May 08, 2008

A look at the Rt 290 site in Shrewsbury, MA

I snuck in from an adjacent street and quickly got to the type of wetland that I remembered from passing in the car. As I approached, I got my first look at the pile that was visible from the highway:
A litttle disappointed, I had thought it was more cleanly rectangular. But it is a carefully built pile anyway and it is fair to say its placement at a point where water is coming out of the ground is deliberate:After taking a good look, I headed downhill to see if there were more piles. In the end their were four or five more, ending with the large curved one I featured a couple of posts ago [click here].

At first there was a propped rock slab next to a remnant rock pile:Here is the view back towards the first pile (you can see cars on the highway beyond) :
Continuing:
Note the size of the rocks in the pile. It is not really a pile so much as an arrangement of rocks. The site is facing more or less north.

Here is the last of the piles, with the large curved one in back.
From slightly further away there are other hints of structure in the way the rocks lie about.
To the left of this last picture, just across from the curved pile, was a pile facing it and built into the stone wall:A viewing platform?

Finally on the downhill side from the curved pile, looking back at it, again there is a sense of structure in the placement of the rocks in the scene:
If you take another look at that curved pile (click here), take a moment to wonder how this site might have been in the past.

2 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

Is the wetland a natural thing or am I just confusing it with something near roadway construction someplace else?
I'm soon to post something about "Cat Hole Road," where a similar stone pile bears much resemblence to the one right next to the water...

pwax said...

The water coming out of the ground is real. I think the highway uphill may have changed things a bit but I suspect it was long after the site was built. In particular the highway probably generated plenty of silt in the water creating mud where there had not been any before.