Wednesday, June 13, 2007

A place out west of here with "monumental" piles

One of my favorite places to walk around looks something like this, with red outlines where I have found rock pile sites:
You can see the power lines of a previous post.

This last weekend I found the site indicated by the upper outline by penetrating the mountain laurel and going up that side of the hill. It turns out there is a trail over there from the road in along the northern edge of the swamp which takes you past the worst of the laurel. When I finally got into navigable woods there were inconspicuous rock piles and a nice pile as soon as I headed uphill:
At all of the sites shown on the map, many of the piles are large and made of large rocks. They appear to be much broken down and, in some cases seem to have some rectalinear structure inside them amidst the tumble of the rocks. Here at this northern site, there were a variety of smaller piles, niches, piles on boulders mixed in with the damaged platforms. Most of the large piles were mid-way up the hill. Some nice piles on boulders continued down into the edge of the wetland and the resumption of laurels.

Some platforms:The more I walk around here, the more I believe the sites are inter-related. The largest red outline and the one I found over the weekend both face southwest towards a prominent hill. The outline to the right has no particular such views.

Here are some other piles from the site. A niche of some sort:I'll put some other pics in a subsequent post.

In the future, after this positive experience of poking in past the laurels and finding something, I map dare to penetrate them in other places.

2 comments :

Tim MacSweeney said...

Stone rows are very much on my mind lately, to say the least. Any observations on the rows I see in the last two photos?

Tim

pwax said...

Yes:
Although they seem integral with the rock piles I think they are not: they run 4 and square and the piles are placed at random with respect to the walls. On the other hand I see two types of piles, some much more ancient than the others. So I guess: old piles then walls built to ignore them, then new piles built to honor the location.