Saturday, June 29, 2013

Hager Park Westminster

Just south of Rt 2, on the way to Mt Wachusett, there is a small hill and a sign for Hager Park.
I went in from the southwest on a forest rd, then cut diagonally uphill. I saw one minor item then continued uphill (I should have looked around more carefully):
There were a few traces at the top of the hill but I soon went back down the east side. Saw a young porcupine, then some traces of wedged rock. At this point - part way down the slope, I started looking a bit more hopefully. 
I saw a little bump in the ferns, discovered it was a rock pile and decided to groom it  -removing some of the plants growing on it. Here it is before cleaning:
 
and after:
You began to see that it was quite big,~15 feet across, with a faint "dimple" on the uphill side. In one place along the lower edge I cleaned a little more of the dirt, down to the rocks. And I could see they went at least another foot deeper. Old.
So after that I started exploring that southeastern slope more carefully. There were other mounds scattered around, very hard to see:
This was hard to make out. More or less completely settled, a few glints of quartz, an indistinct outline. It seemed to taper off into a linear element- a "tail", a "berm", a bit of wall. There were other impressions of linear elements combined with old mound. You get a little bit of the shape:
But no wonder people do not realize how the state's woodlands are packed with Indian burial grounds. They are invisible! It has taken fifteen years for me to learn to see this stuff.
The "piece de resistance" was a larger rectangular mound with a hollow, in a familiar design but here the whole structure was raised up on top of a larger platform:
The rocks in the foreground are part of what I am calling a "platform". Another view:
Another view, of the hollow:
This mound was in the laurels in the flatter area, at the eastern foot of the hill. 

So things are little different out here - way out west. Mt Wachusett looms over this little hill and there would have been an excellent view of the mountain, if not for the trees. Here, as further east and north, there are rectangular mounds with hollows. But these were quite old, perhaps shaped a bit differently, and mostly invisible under the forest growth.

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