Friday, April 20, 2018

Headwaters of Rocky Brook - Sterling MA

This is an area particularly rich in individual rock piles and small sites. I came back here thinking there were some "upper valleys" on the right hand side of the map fragment, where I had not been. This included parking on Upper North Row Rd, next to the old road, heading down the hill and exploring up the valley of the brook there - Rocky Brook and seeing what there was to see.
There is actually a site right next to the road and up behind one of the houses there. As I stepped into the woods I encountered the edges of that site. Looking back towards the road:
Piles made from quartz are rare around here. I only remember seeing one other (Blanchard Rd...somewhere). Continuing:
There is a good amount of quartz in the rock around there, so I found lots of quartz in the walls and piles. Here, a stray rock-on-rock:
And there is something interesting down next to the brook:
It took a while to process this. I was thinking it was a dam (see previously posted video) but actually you can see it is a road coming across from the upper left down to the brook. In this next picture you can see the road going down and across the brook.
Here is another view. I am afraid I never really captured a good sense of the shape of the thing:
The first thing I noticed coming up to it were the strategically placed chunks of quartz, but none show up in these photos. Also there is a distinct shape to the structure which I could not make sense of. It could be another one of those brook-side mounds I generalized about recently (at the end of this post). 
One thought was that the structure was part of a mill and the 'road' was actually a millrace. But no, it goes off next to a pile of smaller rocks, and remains a road:
Seen from the brook, there is a pile with colored quartz:
It is easy, at this time of year, to see faint hints of trail on the ground. It can give you hints of where the foot traffic was. In this previous photo, I see a bit of trail from down to the colored quartz from the pile of small rocks above. Closeup, a pretty rock:
Here is a view of the large structure from above - (the colored rock pile is to the left, and there are chunks of quartz in fore- and back-ground.
Note the short stretch of wall to the upper right (again, here:)
Again, there are hints of trails, showing us how people may have moved around these structures. And there is a reasonably clear association of trails and old roads with this palce. Someone interested in surveying should go have a close look at this. 

In the woods nearby (south of the brook):
And other examples of quartz:
As I say, it is an area full of small features. Like this one from lower down the same brook, a place of gurgling water:
A couple other things worth showing - a "corner bulge"
 And a rock on rock with some parallelism between the rock shapes.
Would you want to make something of this?

4 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

Did you get to the source of the stream??

Tim MacSweeney said...

"Upper North Row Rd" - Row of???

pwax said...

Yeah road names are strange in Stirling. A place where the granny's have tatoos and every farmstand sells goat cheese.

pwax said...

I did not get to the source, probably should have. There was a house in the way - if that is any excuse.