Thursday, June 16, 2016

South of Reeves Hill Wayland - Snake Brook

This is not a particularly exciting conservation land - mostly torn up. But I walked from the water tower, over the hill, down, and followed the margins between hill and water, until I came to undisturbed woods and....wait....ahh....there's a real rock pile:
Not the sort of thing you would find in a movie about rock piles. But it is the site layout that makes this place interesting. It was an outcrop bounded on most sides by wet ground (the outcrop is to the left and we are on the northern side here):
First there were a few piles, evenly spaced, and going along the side of the outcrop. Here are three things in a row. Sorry for the bad picture:

 Some better pictures:
As I look at these pictures, I see little circles of rocks. Another:
Note the white rock.
I don't know about this one:
And cannot get much from the blurry pictures. What have we here?
Best pile of the day. Looking back:
Other piles from around the outcrop:


Another circle?
So I guess this is a marker pile site, organized radially around the outcrop, located at the first available place following this brook upstream from the Charles River. The brook is called Snake Brook. The circles are grouped over to one side. I made the little video you saw here the other day.
Unless you have the whole map to look at it may not be clear but virtually every undisturbed wetland in Middlesex has a rock pile site or sites along the edge.

1 comment :

Curtiss Hoffman said...

Peter -
Snake Brook flows into Lake Cochituate, whose drainage patterns have been altered by damming, so it's unclear whether it is part of the Sudbury or the Charles watershed. (But that's a prime location for stone sites: "Where water flows in 2 directions".)