Tuesday, November 21, 2006

Wachusett Street Leominster (site 4)

***********[Continued from previous post. See map]*****************

...We had barely passed the place where we parked for the walk in to Bayberry Hill when we both looked downhill to the right from the car and saw rock piles on the slope (at 4 on the map). This site is very reminiscent of the one on Little Monoosnuc: piles with larger rocks, on a slope, with a distinct hill across the valley blocking out the view across the valley. Here are some examples of the piles.

This is a nice one:

Here are some others:
[Note for Tim MacSweeney: the wall in the background is part of the wall around an enclosed quadrant. All the piles were over here, outside of the enclosed section.]
For the pile in the next to last picture, I was struck with the sense of a rock pile in motion, in the process of collapsing. The more I look at piles the more I sense that their state of dis-array is an almost a guranteed sign of age. Put another way, the older the pile the more it is collapsed and over time all rock piles end up being erased through a combination of falling down and getting buried in the forest debris.

For what it is worth, I think this is a "marker" pile site. The only reason for the thought is that this is a sloping site, in a dry woods, with a hill across the valley to the southeast. The piles are roughly the same size and, in some cases, I get a sense that they were stacked up before they got knocked down with the passing of time.

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