Sunday, March 02, 2014

Waiting on Woodbridge

    While I am sort of busy looking out for what stones emerge first from under the melting and then refreezing snow, I’m also looking at old files of photos from Woodbridge CT, most of them from late Spring of 2009. The former activity is a little hazardous as I drive and sometimes stop along narrow, frozen snow banked roads along the back roads or glimpse them from the interstate system but there’s so much I never noticed before, rows of stones running up to outcrops or possibly large boulders. The latter activity is the much safer of the two since I pose no hazard to navigation sitting in front of this screen…
    I’m also doing some “recon” on a little hill in Woodbridge where a bit of Blue Trail loops around it, where a few spots have caught my friend Peter’s eye
 – and my interest is peaked in some of the same spots, those little round bumps on little wide and relatively level places between the contours, the wet and swampy places. Since it’s all snow covered, I’ve been gawking at some aerials from different sources – and so has my friend dc. And I find we too share some spots that catch our collective eyes.
     Since I’ve been to the Preserve that shares a parking spot with this one, I don’t doubt that there’s something there, but I wonder if it could be just as jam packed with features such as I’ve see there…

The first screen capture probably won’t impress you much:
That’s a “Bird’s Eye View” from Bing maps. Change the direction of view and suddenly things jump out at you – the river obviously, but also boulders and stones in an area it’s doubtful that anyone ever plowed or cleared field stones from and some massive looking rows of stones as well:
There’s no way to get much detail from these images (poor as they are), but that is an impressive couple rows of stones. How bad is this image below?
But on the hill side to the south of this unnamed hill is what PW calls the Judges Woods, I’ve been walking about there several times and I've seen some similar looking rows where shapes and possibly artistic placement, maybe even with some rock carving/shaping activity might have happened too, makes me think, “There’s that Indian Look” - again."
   Again from Bing, here below is just one such spot that resembles it: 

   And suddenly, as I write this, I remember this: http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2009/09/searching-for-serpent.html and feel like I should sometime return and check if there is an interesting large boulder at the end of both these segments of carefully stacked stones that look like this on the ground:
To get back to the boulders, here’s one “concentration” or “segment” that I may not have posted before from my very first visit to the Preserve, over by Peter’s childhood home:

 That first word that popped up in my Ink Blot Impression area of my brain was “Mountain Lion.” And the word “couch” came up for that boulder next to it – mostly because there’s a similar shaped stone perched on top of a huge boulder at Chimney Cave in Watertown CT, part of the Old Hunting Caves, now better known as Leatherman Caves. But these Woodbridge boulders are “linked” (and if you say that it’s some colonial livestock fence and nothing more, I will wiggle my eyebrows like Groucho Marx and quote him as I say “I can’t say that I don’t not disagree with you” about that…):

And your view of the bigger boulder, as you move toward that couch, may no longer remind you of a Puma, but possibly another sort of animal that may have been purposely enhanced by the same kind of animal perhaps:
 
Interesting edge on the back rest part of the 'couch:'

4 comments :

pwax said...

Curt Hoffman points out that this loop of the Naugatuck trail is actually in the town of Bethany.

Say Tim: take a look southwest of Peck Hill on the Ansonia side of Peck Hill Rd. Unlike that bit of the Naugatuck trail that has been suburbanized, this stretch on the way to Ansonia looks pristine.

Curt Hoffman said...

Or at least most of it is. Tim, do you agree with the 9 spot locations Peter posted last Monday? Is there anything there - or are you waiting for the snow to clear to find out?

Tim MacSweeney said...

Yes that is a Bethany Property - I tracked down the pdf once.
I do agree with PW about the little wide relatively level spots with the little bump that may be a boulder or outcrop - those are sometimes something interesting. Water sources and swamps are almost always good spots. I've got a whole pile of maps with notations on the Elderslie Preserve, just working stuff, not exact locations. There's so much there that it would be a big undertaking to plot all the significant "stone structures."

pwax said...

The "spot locations" I posted were NOT actual sites but proposed locations to look for sites. Since it has mostly been developed, only a couple of those spots still exists to be explored.