A walk in the snow with FFC

My Friend From Carlisle (FFC) gave me a nice compass for Christmas:
You look through the slit along a feature or in any desired direction then, with the small magnifier angled just so, you can read off the numbers from the dial without moving your head or the relation between your eyes and that desired direction.

I did not want to start paying attention to compass directions because many people already focus on alignments and I wanted to notice other things - like water, stone materials, and ground patterns, pile shape - that kind of detail. But it cannot be denied that there are alignments and I want to occasionally pay a little attention to the compass directions. So I started carrying around a cheap boyscout compass recently, ever since I tried to survey that site in Stow (click here ). The Christmas present gives an easier measurement.

An interesting thing, when FFC and I took a walk this last weekend in the snow, in Carlisle, and we came up to a beautiful wall that seemed to have creatures coming out of it in diagonals that pointed up to the sky,
when we made the compass measurement and discovered that the wall ran roughly magnetic north, it was reasonable to conclude this was not a ceremonial wall. We walked on to look for other things. Like this:
and this:
And then on the way out of the woods along the road:
a rock pile:

I think there might have been a site in this area now filled with houses because further along is a place I know from driving bye and glimpsing rock piles. We also walked by that place on the way back to the car:
And how about this for a road-side rock pile:
This is on East Str. in Carlisle. Perhaps you'll see the piles if you drive bye there. I think it fair to say that there was a site here, although we were not sure about the last one. But there are other rock piles visible in at least two other places along East Street.