Friday, October 15, 2010

Lower Sahler Mill Road, Ulster County, NY

I had walked Upper Sahler Mill Road on another visit but this was the first time we continued onto Lower Sahler Mill Road to go out to County Route 2 and back to the car. We passed lots of rock piles (and many more walls) along the way but I figured they were from road construction. Then we came upon this double wall construction, something I'd seen before in more than one stone complex in PA. It led downhill to what looked like a low marshy area.
Maybe 100 to 150 feet on, just past the farmhouse, was a wall and then this grazing area. The large stone is probably not a rock pile, but behind and around it were small piles on small boulders. I include this picture as much to show how Slide Mountain dominates the area as for the stones.
Leaving that farm the road entered woods and the first thing I saw was this pair of wall-linked boulders. This was very different from the many walls we'd seen going straight along fields so far.
On the other side of the road I saw these rock piles.
And the the wall above, leading uphill to a huge boulder.
Further along, more piles, somewhat better formed. Note the big one in the upper right hand part of the picture.
And this split wedged boulder with what appears to be a rock pile behind it. I've looked at some of my other pictures since (I was on a moss and lichen photo kick just then) and found other piles too distant and fuzzy to post.
My last pic is this wall with a huge pine tree growing out of it, showing it has been there a while. I have another (shorter) set of pictures from our hike to Sunset Rock in Greene County and I'll post them soon. Thanks to Peter and everyone for letting me post.

4 comments :

Geophile said...

Sorry about so many pictures in one post. Probably should have divided it up.

pwax said...

Those are very pretty.

There is a sort of boxy look to them like the other one you showed the other day.

pwax said...

These days blogger doesn't care about the number of pictures. Post at will.

Geophile said...

To get into the more theoretical stuff, it's easy to see that Slide Mountain resembles a breast from this area. It's also next to another peak, seen better from places along Upper Sahler Mill Road, but that other peak has 2 points on it instead of one.

I don't know whether anyone else has read Paul Devereux's Symbolic Landscapes, but he points out that in Greece and some places in the British Isles at least, ceremonial stone constructions are often built in view of paired peaks. He suggests they might represent breasts or horns.

Of course, a good part of the time, observation on the ground here would suggest that these complexes tend to be built in places where there are lots of stones. :-)