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?