Saturday, June 27, 2015

Nice stone walls

There really are nice stone walls everywhere I go around the Gumpas in Pelham NH. It would be a worthwhile project to map them. Coming up from the east side, I was thinking: "more wall than pile":
This is fine work:
A small disturbance in the ferns, at the tip top of a watershed:
I decided it was a small collapsed "seat":
And there is that hole in the wall again (at the base of the wall, right next to a high point):
When I got up and over to the upland ponds there was a place where the wall was about 7 feet tall:
And by the time I got over to those ponds, there were rock piles:
I was trying to think of a word for a culture that lived around small lakes and ponds. Later I phoned my wife to Google the word for "lake" in Greek and in Latin: "limne" and "lacus". So a culture that is "circum-limneic" or "peri-lacustrine".
Separately, I was wondering what would you need a seven foot tall wall for? I cannot see it being needed for any of the usual agrarian explanations for stone walls.

3 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

From Native People of Southern New England, 1500-1650 by Professor Kathleen J Bragdon re: “Lacustrine:” “By A.D. 1000, three distinct ecological regions had emerged in southern New England: maritime/estuarine; riverine; and uplands/lacustrine.” {Used here: http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2008/02/lacustrine.html}

coterminous:“(George R.) Hamell’s research focused on those sacred places…metaphorical thresholds between this world and other worlds, the crossing of which entails physical, spiritual, and social transformation. Thresholds might, he argues, be coterminous for farming people with the village clearing…(A)nomalous watery places, springs, whirlpools, swamps, and marshes, many identified with…salamanders, lizards, turtles, frogs, and snakes, as well as…beavers and otters (from Man in the Northeast 1987:67-69, listed in her References as “Mythical Realities and European Contact in the Northeast during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries” 33: 63-87). Again from K. Bragdon’s Native People of Southern New England, used here:
http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/2008/02/coterminous.html

Tommy Hudson said...

Interesting "threshold" reference. I have been looking at topo maps of that area lately, since Peter started posting on it, and that whole Gumpus Hill-Seavey Hill area is interesting.

pwax said...

What I see, in overview of that area, is that it is packed with lakes. A real headwater area.