"To Walk" - a list a places that look worth visiting

Thought this might be slightly interesting. Current list of suggested walks:

To walk:

• Just east and south of Flat Rock Hill, Dunstable
• SE of Ashland REservoir
• southwest of easternmost Trout Brook (and a bit to the northeast wouldn't hurt either) scanlon brook.
• East of Stagecoach Rd.
• Nobby Hill MAson
• The rest (downhill) of from Wittemore Hill
• Russell Hill Brookline NH, has a trail through it on Mapnik.
• Rock Hill on boundary of Ayer - look to the southern innards.
• STILL RIVER, harvard. Worth a quick look at a couple of water sources
• A valley SE of West Bare Hill and Scott Rd, harvard
• Bottom of Vaughn Hill, near 110
• Between Wausachuum Ponds in Stirling/Clintton - "Kendall Hill"
• Stillwater River in general has feeder brooks to explore.
• Wallace Brook Upton.
• MA/NH border north of Dracut: Burns Hill etc.[been ther. 2 small sites]
• NOrtheast of Lake Shirley. A couple of spots.
• East end of Sherburne Rd In NH south of Gumpas: Fred. Memorial...cons land.
• "Percival Lot" next to 190 have not been explored enough.
• Tully Mountain Royalston - what the heck.
• Any bits of woods where 495 crosses Stowe Rd 0 including the median.
• Southernmost Wachusett reservoir, a hill under the “BOY” of “Boylston, written vertically on topo map.
• Hill NE of South Berlin [too small]
• E of Sawyer Hill Rd, across from Gates Pond.
• South of Mt Pisgah, north of 290.
• Many big woods north and west of Wachuestt reservoir, east of 190 (gimme a break!)
• A  big empty woods in Westwood - Deadham Town Forest
• Lower Westboro Reservoir
• Northeast Dunstable.
• places in pepperel.
• North of Wright Ponds
• (Also) Along Wares Rd, Fitchburg (border of WBSF)
• Fay Mountain in Westboro, behind the water tank.
• Between New West TOwnsend Rd and Pearl Hill Rd. The souther part is boring but
• the northern part was not explored.
• --------------------------
• NW of L Whitehall [DONE]
• Lovell REservoir in northern Fitchburg is accessible from Scott Rd side. [DONE THAT NOW I THINK. and it was great!]
• East of Redeption Rock Rd, both north and south of Hobbs Rd.[DONE THAT]
• Oak Hill Ashland [YOU WERE THERE LONG AGO]
• Westmister State F. near border with Hubbarston - Wright's Pond and
• Partridge Pond. [DID IT...? DULL]
• North and East of Bare Hill Sherborn (so so)
• just west of little Wachuesett (2 small sites at gullies)
• NW of Witch Brook in Townsend. Park on Gilchrist Rd. Big empty woods. (SANDY?)
• East or Richardson Rd, Fitchburg. (Park on Rt 31)
• NW of Ashby Reservoir (southwest of Blood Hill)[NAAH was dull]
• Benjamin Hill Shirley [Been there, one boxmound]
• Groton Woods (west of claypit hill) [DONE. GOOD STUFF]
• Directly north of "Sudbury" Center there is a cons land "Haynes Farm". Actually more than one swamp edge sort of place.[Been THERE. Found stuff.]
• Broadmoor cons land, east of Brush Hill Sherborn And other hills (Pine, Peter's) there to do.[ALL PRETTY SANDY. SMALL POTATOES ON PETER'S HILL]
• GOSPEL HILL in Hudson - park at the school [NOT ENOUGH WOODS THERE]
• Upper Catacoonamug in Lunenburg is a conservation land. [BORING]
• North of Barrel rd, northwest of Muddy Pond. [Boring slog in winter.]
• North of Horse Hill, just across Groton Rd. [Dull on both sides if road]

East of Lake Whitehall (again)

Previous stories here, especially this one. There are good sized conservation lands east of the lake and I went to the northernmost part, finally finding a "marker pile" site at the blue outline.

This has several typical features I won't point out, but note the way the water is at the low point and center of the site. We enter:

At the bottom, at that moment when you realize it is a rock pile site:

And the way the piles cross the slope above:

 The "money" shot:

Nice individual piles:

Here are 4 in a curved "row". The water is downhill to the left.

This is similar to the site I reported recently from Princeton, where the piles also were  clustered above a small spot of water. One more detail of the water:

NE of Lake Whitehall - Stone Walls

"Hopkinton Springs" - A Neara Field Trip to a Mavor & Dix site

In the chapter of Manitou by Mavor and Dix where they discuss the Upton chamber, they also discuss the vicinity of the chamber and some of the features found around the Whitehall Reservoir in Hopkinton, MA. In particular they talk about a place with mineral springs, used during the 19th century, and an adjacent site of earthworks and stone mounds (what I call rock piles). Here is the map they draw in the book on p.43:
So we went there last weekend on the NEARA field trip, and more than 1/2 the site is now gone to development. The earthworks, shown in the picture as a pentagon in one place and an upside down "T" in another - did not look very compelling when seen on the ground. The rock piles, were as decrepit and invisible as they get: smeared, low to the ground, hidden in a new grove of pine saplings:In retrospect, we could not have gotten to the sort of place shown as a cluster of rock piles on the upper right of the Manitou map. Either that has now been destroyed or we never actually found the location. Instead we saw was a minor rock pile site.

At the top of the slope with the cluster of piles was a solitary boulder with unusual geology and possible human manipulation - creating some curved marks on the boulder. Maybe it was where you sit in order to see the rock piles which would all have been visible from that point - spread out to the sides and below on the slope. They looked like marker piles but there are other possibilities. Hard to tell when you cannot see anything for the trees. - a bit of a disappointment. As I drove home I passed many places I know. We saw several fragments of chambers during the day, but I passed a more interesting one on the the way home, at a place we drove past to get to the mineral springs.

Riffing a bit more on this topic I want to offer a criticism of Manitou. We all know what a wonderful book it is, seminal in every way; but I think they made a few mistakes. First of all, they give a false sense that sites are rare. In fact, sites are all over the place - everywhere you look where they have not been destroyed. Secondly, the focus in Mavor and Dix is on astronomy. It is hard to doubt that what they call the "Earth, Sea, and Sky" were perceived by the Indians as interconnected, but I do doubt that the sky was as uniquely important as the authors make out in Manitou. For my money, water was more important.

Perhaps because they portrayed rock pile sites as rare, the sites they describe have a certain glamour. But sometimes, at least with the example above, when you see one of their sites on the ground it is less compelling than you would imagine from their description. For example, the mineral springs seem to consist of water coming out of the same glacial till ridge in three different places:I think the water would be what you get by filtering through sand and gravel - and no sense that one spring was "sulfur" and the next "magnesium" and "iron". Maybe that was 19th century marketing hype. I am not sure what to make of the earthworks.

In spite of my bitching, I hope NEARA readers will forgive me. It was nice to be out with other folk.

The Hopkinton Beehive - Neara Fieldtrip to Hopkinton, MA

Standing around before leaving:

[PICTURE REMOVED DUE TO CONCERNS ABOUT TRESSPASSING]

This was somewhere near Whitehall Reservoir. Here we are shown a copy of a page from the book "The Ruins of Great Ireland in New England" by William B. Goodwin.Apparently this was a corbelled structure built against a boulder. All that remains today:From the side:Here is the photo Malcolm Pierson took before the book was written: Standing around at the "chamber":
Also in the neighborhood was what we were told was another stone chamber that had been reconstructed according to the owner's knowledge/belief of the structure that had been there before it had been damaged. But maybe the owner actually got the idea from Malcolm Pierson's photo? These are all historic structures (I mean they have all been written about). See Flavin's Corner on "Dolmen Doldrums".

Hopkinton Field Trips with Bruce McAleer

Bruce took me to a couple of sites last weekend. Here is the first one, a slope along the eastern shore of Whitehall Reservoir in Hopkinton. Bruce tells the story: he was canoeing with his wife on the lake and, caught by rain, they came to shore here. Bruce saw some nice quartz outcrops and thought: "there must be some rock piles around here" and started looking around. The site is on a slope facing westward over the water. At the top is an outcrop: Where Bruce is standing there was some quartz that looked like it had been manipulated:And there was a bit of wall starting at the outcrop and going off downhill (left in the picture above) towards the water. Look at the little bit of connecting wall near Bruce's feet - a compulsive joining together of parts of the outcrop:And here is a view of the slope:There are about five rock piles in this picture, low to the ground, and some of them having bits of quartz. This sometimes suggests burials but I was not confident of that at this site. For one thing, many of the piles were up on support boulders. Another common type of pile, that I started to notice here, was piles with a large rock at one end. Maybe these are headstones? Another:And one more:I show these because it only dawned on me belatedly that this was a repeated pattern at this site. So I want to give enough examples that you get the idea. To me, the most interesting feature of the site was another stone wall, also coming up from the water up towards the outcrop, but to the side. This wall curved towards the outcrop and stopped thirty yards or so from the outcrop. At first we were over by the wall looking at some rock piles near it:But then I noticed a curious bulge coming out from the wall, you can see it to the right side of this picture: Here is a closeup: You can see this was a structure. There were some large flat plates of rock in the tumble and it really looked like a collapsed chamber. Definitely worth looking at some more. Then, downhill closer to the lake, the wall went around a corner. See the nice quartz at the middle of the corner?I should also mention some piles built up with vertical sides - suggesting not graves but "marker" (i.e. calendrical) piles. I should also mention that there was another wall at the lower end of the site. Across this wall, on the lake side, were two fairly large piles made with large rocks.

A rare quartz wedged rock

This is the first example I have seen of quartz used as a wedge in a split rock. So this is pretty rare. Given that split rocks are suspected to represent doorways to the underworld, I always thought the absence of such quartz as a wedge was because you would not be leaving this kind of amplifier/ transmitter at an entrance. But, right or wrong, here is an example from east of Whitehall Reservoir.This leaves my theory scrambling for excuses to the effect that this must have been a particularly friendly spirit.

Last look East of Whitehall Reservoir

Let me continue posting about the site I discussed earlier [click here] and [here] and [here] with this last little grouping of features about a boulder:Visible a few yards away: A place of small rock pile clusters, low outcrops and knolls with bits of wetland in between.

East of Whitehall Reservoir - Hopkinton, MA

Let me continue posting about the site I discussed earlier [click here] and [here]. Let's look at the map again:The area where I saw rock piles was perhaps 60 yards across east-west by a hundred or so yards across north-south. As I zig-zagged back and forth looking at different (or maybe connected) clusters of rocks piles, I thought I should be systematic. As I got up towards the highest point at the northern end, I was thinking I had to look thoroughly or I might miss something. This payed off when I spotted the largest and best built of the piles in the whole area, a kind of master pile just southeast of the summit. I am not sure why there was one bigger pile here but it seemed noteworthy.

A first view:And some other angles:The pile is an elongated oval in outline.

My sense is that if you go in along the red spot trail, when you get to the fork with the green spot trail......you should be able to see it a few yards away:

East of Whitehall Reservoir - Hopkinton, MA (2)

Let me continue posting about the site I discussed earlier [click here], an area in Hopkinton of small knolls and wet spots and small rock piles clustered around and among the knolls. There were what looked like small enclosures in a few places on the knolls giving a sense of being places to look outward from.

For example:
You can see a kind of "U" shaped enclosure, right of center, opening towards the camera. A line of rocks leads off downhill to the left. Here is a view from the side of those rocks:There is a small rock pile at the lowest point (on the right in the picture) and you can also make out a few other placed rocks above it. Here is a view back up the line of rocks, we are looking back up towards the enclosure:
There were similar structures in a couple of places built into the outcrops. Here is the suggestion of something built into the outcrop:Here was another:
A closeup helps show this is an artificial structure:It is not certain that these constructions were used to look outward but it is consistent with the many small rock piles scattered around and the possibility that the piles were seen from above and used as positional markers. Looking back through the pictures, I also see several split rocks that seem to be part of the deliberate manipulation.