Friday, May 13, 2011

Surprising Hollow Road Rock Piles

Upper Hollow Road in Watertown CT is an old farm road, still unpaved, a small stream running along it, a border between two former farms now long gone. I was probably on the edge of the former Wheeler Farm and if I looked at old aerial photography I'm sure I'd find I was in a former apple orchard. The remnant trees and their wild descendents were in bloom. But there were some rock piles, like the one above, behind a big boulder, to the east of the stone. It's unlike any other stone heap I've seen before and it took a few moments to realize that all the stones were in the quartz family. It's not likely that the Wheeler Family  removed only quartz and quartzite stones from the orchard or a cornfield and hauled them all the way over here...

There is quite a bit of quartzite in a nearby stone row segment, maybe a little more than is average. The segment is about 100 feet long.

Near where it ends is another stone mound, mostly mixed stones of the cobble size, about 25 feet in diameter...



There is a carefully made outer border, some of them "two people" sized stones, and, walking up onto the mound, it seemed to be composed of several concentric rings and a small circle at the highest point (which wasn't really that high). In the center of the circle there was a "two hands" size silver grey quartzy shining through all the green growing on top of the mound: 


To the South East of the mound was a 4-5 foot circle of stones, sort of like a fire ring as well as another 4-5 foot diameter stone pile opposite that on the North East side of the big mound, just as far from the mound as the circle of stones...
 
Heading down from there I came across a "Rock Pile with a Tail," something I'd only read about here at Rock Piles. A 4-5 foot diameter pile and a tail that looked like it might be a bunch of circular pilings...
Above is looking toward the stone heap from the tail,
Below the other way around:
Above: 1934 aerial photo
Below: stone row remnants and the four stone mounds, largest is the white circle at top (with second pile and hearth in grey), circle with white dot is the quartzy mound, and the other two are the mounds with tails...

4 comments :

pwax said...

Ooh, hey, wow!

pwax said...

I would love to see some sketches of piles or site layout.

Tim MacSweeney said...

How about an aerial photo?

pwax said...

Cool! So nice to see other rock piles with hollows and tails.