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".

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:

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.

East of Whitehall Reservoir - Hopkinton MA (1)

There are scattered small rock pile groupings throughout at least the area outlined and probably more. The topography is of small knolls and bits of wetland mixed together and, as far as I can tell, small rock pile sites occur at each knoll. To me they look like simple marker pile sites. Most of the piles consist of a handful of smaller rocks built on top of a larger rock with occasional more substantial piles having a well-built vertical face. I got the sense that the piles were visible from and clustered about the little knolls.

Drove to Hopkinton. I parked on Pond St, just west of and downhill from the nearest house. Entered the woods and cut off from the trail (which was marked like this:)I was not too optimistic but saw an interesting propped boulder and was re-assured:After a while I got into the eastern portion of what I had planned to explore and came across a small cluster of piles:Here is a view downhill from above, to give a sense of the moment and place.There are lots of rocks in the picture (click to enlarge). I believe most of them were manipulated. After all, the larger rocks were manipulated:Nearby the first cluster of rock piles, I came across an obvious boundary marker, (the approach:)(The closeup:)Any illusion that such boundary marking might explain the presence of the rock piles and larger manipulated rocks was dispelled not long after when I came to another group of piles, these slightly bigger and better built.

(Two views of a pile)And another nearby. Do you see the vertical face? Imagine viewing these from the knoll...I am thinking something to do with the shadows...? Here was another knoll with a damaged structure on it:This continued, with a couple of further highlights I'll put in separate posts: a larger central pile and some places that stone seats were built into the outcrops.

Update: an Anonymous commenter says they do not see the vertical face of the piles I showed above. Imagine the red outline graphic being in a single plane - not exactly vertical but close. That plane is visible in the pile, which is shown without the graphic above.

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.

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.

"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.