Friday, December 06, 2013

Dunklee Pond - Hollis NH

I went a long way from home for my last day of exploring over Thanksgiving holiday. The area around Silver Lake State Park, and Dunklee Pond in particular, looked undisturbed and with a nice topographic combination of water and hill. It took most of an hour to drive up there and I parked and started in from the north- following the old dirt road. I hoped to find things around that inner valley there on the map and in some of the valleys between the hills:
Walking southward, I am thinking "this is a nice woods, I just wish there were more rock piles" and almost immediately one showed up on the top of a bank to my left. So I went up there and found a rock pile:
When I looked around carefully, there were two good sized rock piles, and some nearby outcrops that looked good to have been part of the "situation" as well.
So the main question is: are the rock piles way up here in NH different from the ones I am used to?
 (see the quartz?)
From the other side:
(a nice big pile). Here is a second one:
(see the bit of structure)
Here is view from the second back towards the first:
Here we see Parker Pond Brook in the background:
 Here we see the (from left to right) an outcrop, the second pile, the first pile:
Here is another small pile in relation to the outcrop, taken from left of the view in the above picture:
These piles are a bit different from the ones I know down south in MA. They are a bit like some to the north of Horse Hill in Groton. I left this place and continued on, walking to the east along the edges of the hill.

...soon I came to another place with a decrepit wall leading to something strange in the distance:
And here also were a couple of small piles around a large pile built against a boulder:
An interesting structure. The site itself, like the first above, consists of a few small piles near a big one built on a boulder. It is as though here (in NH) the "rectangular mound with hollow" has been replaced with another type of structure: a pile built against a boulder; but the smaller piles and site arrangement are familiar. 
Look at this little niche at the near end of the wall:
I walked back towards the north, I cut across a hill and couple of valleys and saw more rock piles in there:
As I wrote in an earlier post, there are plenty more woods where these came from. I can't wait to get back out there and explore some more.

3 comments :

pwax said...

I make the comment about Horse Hill in Groton casually; but looking at a map I see that here in Hollis and there in Groton are very similar in their relation to the Nashua River. I want to see trends.

pwax said...

In the same vein, the similarities are reasonable if the north-south Nashua River be regarded as a highway. But if overland travel east-west was more common, the similarities would be in that direction.

pwax said...

Also, I want to comment on the niche that we see at the end of the wall in picture #15 (not counting the map). If you look closely at what I am calling the "second big pile" in picture #6 there is a similar niche visible - or at least suggested in the picture, on the left side.

Such niches are not familiar.