A walk in Estabrook Woods with J Walter Brain (part 1)

Via Norman Muller, I met Walter Brain for a walk starting at the north end of Estabrook Woods and the plan was to go look at a previously un-reported stone "chamber". Walter is a town planner by profession but is well known locally as a Thoreau scholar, historian, botanist, and local conservationist. Since we were going in via Kibbe's cellar hole, I asked if we could take a slight digression because I wanted to ask about the numerous rock piles that dot that area.
It is a magical time to be in the woods, with the yellow green of the first leaves letting in plenty of light. Here is a picture of J Walter Brain.He had not noticed the rock piles [correction, he had], and we talked about why they might be all over the place at the Kibbe place. Kibbe was an unusual character and I asked whether perhaps Kibbe was an Indian?These are some pretty good-sized piles.At first Walter was expressing the thought that these were probably simple bi-products of stone disposal but, by the time we got to this last one, it was pretty clear these piles are placed not dumped. There is rock size selection, construction, and structure indicating a deliberate purpose.

We saw maybe four examples of split filled rocks. The first couple were observed without much comment.When we got to this one, Walter agreed this was obviously not practical:[Note the white, black, white, color sequence of the wedges.]

But we were not here to see rock piles, so we continued northeast of the cellar hole into an area that, according to Walter, belonged to the Green family. To see the Isaiah Green spring and the "chamber". First, one more rock pile we saw on the way, a new one for me:
(closer)
[Quite a pile.]
....to be continued.

Stone Mounds at the Edge of a Land Trust

Stone Mounds at the Edge of a Land Trust

A couple of spring time woodland scenes

[Not rock pile related]
A painted turtle, looking for someplace to lay eggs, or perhaps returning from such: A viburnum flower. Not sure which variety: It reminds me of a hydrangea.

Muddy Pond West

I thought if the northeast side of Muddy Pond had interesting rock piles (as reported here) then perhaps the northwest side would too. It turns out there is a low peninsula of land extending into the edges of Muddy Pond from that side which has numerous large and small rock piles, berms, and walls. There is a sense of the site having an overall organization. I believe this is similar also to the sites in the Manoosnocs and the one in Callahan State Forest.

I wasn't sure where to park but picked somewhere near Barrel Rd and walked eastward into the woods and immediately hit a small isolated rock pile.
(closeup)
Then I continued along a path and saw a different kind of pile next to the path (at A).It did not look very prepossessing but I looked downhill from it, towards the water, and spotted a stone wall coming up from the wetland and ending in a couple of disjointed rock piles (at B). The middle pile was interesting because it looked to have been chambered and vandalized:
The terminal pile was an elongated mound angled differently from the direction of the stone wall below.This is very similar to the second pile I saw on the way in, the first day at Muddy Pond (northeast) a couple of weeks ago - where that pile looked like a continuation of a stone wall after a gap but angled differently than the wall.

Further down the peninsula (at C) there was a berm of cobbles with nice pieces of quartz and several satellite piles. Like the wall, the berm ended in a discontinuous pair of elongated rock piles. The map fragment is not accurate but gives a slight sense of the layout.

On the peninsula, at a kind of apex, there was one larger pile made from significantly larger rocks.At the edge of the peninsula, a berm of smaller cobbles mixed with quartz.There were several smaller piles that I imagined as in relation to these larger features. Pictured here in the foregrounds:This last one was the first thing I noticed and tried to video. Later on re-examination I thought perhaps it was placed in relation to the chunk of quartz in the berm behind it. Here is a low grade video to try to make the point. You be the judge.

Near Judges Rock in Woodbridge CT

I left my camera home accidentally but had my new digital video camera with me when I took a walk in Peter's Old Backyard but my batteries died at the big X on the map. I wandered off and on the blue trail and turned back north on the yellow and red trail. There were lots of interesting stones, outcrops and mounds. I will return to to do some more exploring and take some more photos.

Peter tells me he "lived on Rock Hill Rd that was named after the famous "Judges Rock," a large erratic that was at a lookout point. You can look up the story of the three regicide judges (Dixwell, Whaley, and Goff) and how they hid out, possibly with the help of Indians. Supposedly they watched for redcoats from the rock."

I had recently read a 1914 article about the Judges hiding out at another place called "The Lodge" and finding "a crude Indian stone axe" at "Safe Harbor," and bunch of obsure stuff. I'd wondered how I'd ever find it and then Peter sails in and points me right to it by an amazing coincidence.

Here is the first mound I came across, connected to two stone rows...

Acton Potato Cave "restored"

They also renamed it as the "Nashoba Chamber". Something of the mystery is now gone from the place and they closed off the little "window" that Strohmeyer said let in the winter solstice sunrise. On the other hand it is nice to see the enclosure to the right of the chamber cleared of dirt.

Here is Joe joking around in the entrance: And the view back out from inside - blurry but, at least, without flash:

Rock Art - cupules

From Norman Muller:
Robert Bednarik, a prominent international rock art specialist from Australia, has posted a number of interesting articles on his website. His one on cupules is probably the last word.

The link is here: http://mc2.vicnet.net.au/home/aura/web/info.html.

A context for historic or even modern rock piles

My understanding is that Indians did not live at a place but moved in and out of places with the seasons. So they would come and go, come and go. Over time, fewer and fewer made it back to their places but there are still a few getting up into my area of Massachusetts, and I believe they are still conducting rituals that leave rock piles behind. So there can be recently built piles - although they lack something from the older ones. The fresh ones I find seem a bit "off". This should not be confused with the modern vertical stacks of stones people are building along trails.

Walk Along Nashoba Brook

There are lots of rock piles along Nashoba Brook in Acton. Interrupting what has been and will continue to be near continuous non-stop coverage of Muddy Pond, here are some pictures of a walk I took along the brook with my son Joe. I had spotted a new way in via the railroad tracks on Rt 2A, just south of the corner with Rt 27, and had seen some unexplored woods over there. There were sure to be rock piles, and there were. It is a nice experience to step into the woods expecting to see rock piles, and seeing them:Then we did not see much and got over to the place where there is a bridge across the brook and the potato cave on the other side and through the woods. But I stayed on the near side, and poked around in the breakout zone uphill from the southern end of the bridge.

I had forgotten that there is someone out here (at Nashoba) building rock piles but I think there is. I was reminded of it by the fresh appearance of one pile. The top rock is lacking lichen.This was a little cluster of rock piles in a breakout zone here, that I had not seen before. I cannot say it was typical - for example I did not specifically see a split-wedged rock here (although there is one 50 yards away on the other side of the stone wall) but there were lots of rock-on-rocks, small piles, and slightly unusual standing stones.Plenty of tree fall damage too, so some of this could have been natural. But I think not in the case of this one (background of previous picture):Nice colors too:

More Muddy Pond coming

Three Unusual Walls - from Norman Muller

While the majority of stone fences in the Northeast are constructed with larger stones on the bottom and smaller ones on top, there are some examples that break the mold. Larry Harrop in Rhode Island has recorded some that are quite unusual looking. One example, in Canonchet, a small town in the southwest corner of the state near the Connecticut border, consists of huge boulders supported by smaller stones underneath (Fig. 1),

not unlike the propped or pedestaled boulders we often find in the glaciated woods of New England. From a simple, practical standpoint, this type of construction doesn’t make sense. Why place a huge boulder on smaller stones when building a wall, when the opposite would require much less work? And as we know, colonial farmers were a practical lot.

A month ago, I saw and photographed an unusual stone wall in northwest Georgia that was integrated with an outcrop that looked like stone fins. I was with a small group of rock art enthusiasts, and among our group was Jack Steinbring, an international rock art expert from Wisconsin, who had no problem accepting that the wall was aboriginal. One piece of evidence in favor of the wall being Indian was that near the end of the wall was at least one Indian burial, if not three. The most prominent consisted of an exposed stone cist that had once been covered with small boulders. According to our guide, Tommy Hudson, the burial had been rifled through, and some diagnostic artifacts had been taken from it. But what I found fascinating about the wall, apart from the way it was built into the outcrop, were areas where some large boulders were supported by smaller stones (Fig. 2).

Here, apparently, was an Indian wall, and for some reason large boulders had been lifted up and placed on smaller stones.

Just the other day I received photographs of a wall in Pomfret, Vermont, a small town in the middle of the state (Fig. 3).

Again, in a low resolution image we find the same kind of construction that has been found in Rhode Island and Georgia. These three walls, similarly constructed and hundreds of miles apart, appear to represent a common idea among the builders: that for some reason it was important to show large boulders supported by much smaller ones. For what reason, I have no idea.

Could there be another explanation?

Muddy Pond from the west - videos

Muddy Pond - Westminster, MA (3)

Upon leaving the site I have been describing (part 1 here and part 2 here) I walked out via a clearcut bit of woods directly north of the pond. There were some more rock piles over here, scarred by the tread marks of the logging machines. Then I got back to my car and drove away to the south via a road that runs along the west side of Muddy Pond. I kept my eyes on the woods to the left thinking that, if there were sites along the northern and northeastern sides of the pond, there might be more along the northwestern side of the pond. What I saw was the remnants of some kind of small community. First a big rock pile:Then something like a foundation hole. What kind of foundation fills with water in the spring?There were little roadways:And other smaller, shallower, foundation holes:This was a small ruin in the woods. Looked like a small farm; but no older or younger than the ruins we saw pictures of the other day from Calendar I. In any case this seems of the same nature and age as the other site across the pond.

Ground Piles with quartz: Muddy Pond - Westinster, MA (2)

Near the first site (click here) I reported, there was a flat area filled with low ground piles. Most piles showed a single piece of white quartz. Now FFC thinks the piles were evenly spaced and in lines; I got distracted and did not really verify that. At first I saw a solitary pile on a boulder:This pile is a bit like a damaged effigy, with a larger "head" rock at one end. And then my feet stumbled on a ground pile and, looking around, I saw several more. These are piles with a single piece of quartz:They were pretty well covered with debris and pretty hard to notice unless you stepped on one.Here is one of the nicest examples I ever saw of a ground pile with quartz:And a closeup of the quartz:Out here, "out west" (beyond the Nashua River from where I live) there are many places where the woodlots and fields have grown back to forest. This place was open and without trees maybe 50 years ago, judging from the ground cover and the size of the trees:
Mountain Laurel, a member of the rhododendron family is one of the opportunistic plants that fills these open spaces back in. At times it is dense and hard to get through and yet it's presence is a sign to me that I am out in the wild places - pushing through like a jungle explorer, finding new ruins in the forest. So I have a love-hate relationship with the plant. I have learned how to get through even pretty dense laurel and I idealize the idea of finding rock piles in the laurel. This is getting close to that ideal:
This is as close as you can get, with a single rock visible from the pile:
So let me summarize: a flat spot, with ground piles. Piles with single pieces of quartz. All beside a single effigy-like rock pile built on a boulder. These are characteristics I think of in association with burials. However the FFC statement about even spacing and lines of piles suggests an alternative possibility, a site with some calendrical function. Either way, a nice site beginning to be covered over with laurels. A view to the south of Mt. Wachusett.