Getting back off that hill...

...wasn't so easy because it was overcast and beginning to rain. It had already rained a bit earlier. When I started back from the hilltop site I have been reporting for the last week, I realized that the compass I carry around (for occasionally examining alignment directions) could also be used for direction finding. Who knew! Unfortunately I did not think of using the compass at the beginning of the walk so I did not know what direction would carry me in the reverse direction from the one I came in along. I did not want to retrace my steps so I took my best guess and headed out. Each time I passed through a band of white pine saplings, I picked up a few more drops of water at the ends of the pine needles, getting a bit more wet.

Since I was trying to get out of the woods, it came as an almost un-welcome distraction that I stumbled on another rock pile.
It was part of another cluster of rock piles. This time right behind the houses near the little pond in the aerial photo I showed at the beginning of the discussion. These were scattered about on the little bumps and hollows on a gradual slope with springs.
All the piles were pretty thoroughly broken down and I did not see any special characteristics. No white rocks, no strange shapes. I was on my way out of there anyway; maybe I did not notice. Certainly there were some things worth a closer look:
Also, I showed you that stone circle? This is too wide to be a fire circle. Right next to the little pond (which was man-made), this afforded some view of the surrounding rock piles.
What do you think about that? I find it hard to imagine a context for it.

Last look at Gilmore Rd hilltop site

This particularly nice pile:Then this alignment of rock piles. You see three rock piles in the line but as a faint lighter patch at the horizon a large boulder is near the top of the hill. Not everything at this site is visible from the boulder but certainly the piles in this line would be. Here is the boulder:Around the boulder there were rock piles visible in each direction against a near horizon but the majority of the site was to the south of the boulder.

Ceremonial Time: Fifteen Thousand Years on One Square Mile

"Ceremonial time is the moment when past, present and future can be perceived simultaneously."

Ceremonial Time is a non-fiction book written by John Hanson Mitchell and first published in 1984. It takes a look at fifteen thousand years of the past on Scratch Flat, a one square mile tract of land in Littleton, MA. The book is heavily influenced by Mitchell's accounts from his Indian friends.

Although rock piles are not specifically mentioned, there is much information to be gleaned from this book -- particularly for those of us who spend time exploring in Littleton.

The definition of, "ceremonial time," alone is remarkable, particularly as I recall my own experiences while documenting stone structure sites. I have experienced this concept of ceremonial time more than once while exploring. The most remarkable occurred just before I left Rhode Island -- it was an experience that left me quite shaken, actually -- but it also left me far less of a skeptic than I was before.

Ceremonial time adds to the idea of convergence at many sacred sites. Not only were they places where the Skyworld, Earthworld, and Underworld converged, but they may have also been places where time was least linear -- where the past, present, and future could be perceived simultaneously.

[CLICK HERE] to see a preview of Ceremonial Time at Google Books.

Stone wall oddities

by theseventhgeneration

Tim M. commented about the stone wall that is part of the the stone wall bulge in a prior post. Click here for the link to the 2/29/08 post and comments.

I went back to the wall yesterday for some more photos and found a few more things that I hadn't seen before.

Here is one picture of the wall bulge, that I took last fall:



Not far from the wall bulge is this stone, resting rather inconspicuously on the wall, semi upright. I hadn't noticed it before. If you click on the image to enlarge it, you may be able to see a mark on the stone, near the center, like an upside down L. There are two similar marks in the lower left hand corner of the stone, running up and down. I don't know if these marks are natural or not.



I also noticed a couple of breaks in the wall that I hadn't paid attention to in the past. After a small break in the wall that is connected to the wall bulge, there is another stone, this one standing against the wall, not on top:



Then there is an aperture in the wall. This aperture is not far from one of the rock piles in the large cairn field:



Right next to the aperture, there is this unusual set of structures:



There is an unusual rock, which I believe is a quartz conglomerate, there, right next to the bright green mossy area. Here are some close ups:





I was convinced before that this is not a colonial or agrarian stone wall, but now I am certain.

Rock pile picture contest

What is the largest number of rock piles you can get into a single picture?

Note: modern piles not allowed.

I submit this picture [Click here]

Updated from comments:
JimP writes: I think you've got it beat, but this one from Larry Harrop is a very close second for the moment. CLICK HERE

Larry writes: Hold on now. Thats not fair because Peter's picture is a panorama where as mine is a single picture. Lets level the playing field with my panorama

I write: To be honest I think Larry could beat me. Maybe a panorama of the location in JimPs link would do the trick.

Pit's connected to walls and boulder

Interesting features found by Nick Holland adjacent to a rock pile site in Hopkinton State Park.

...I also found a 10 to 15 foot diameter hemispheric pit in the woods, much like one I'd found in Sandwich last year. Just as I was leaving, I stumbled across another hemispheric pit, with a short, low wall connecting it to a boulder about 8 feet away.
Last is of a rock pile with a large white quartz stone in the center. Found near pit/wall/boulder thing.

Speaking more about Dolmen's

(Link from Norman Muller) [Click here]

About that little pond

I said I'ld get back to that later. Here is a little video of the area next to the pond, filled as it is with springs and low outcrops and old broken down rock piles.

For some reason the stone circle almost brings a tear to the eye.

I'm so lucky getting to see these places...

More views from the hilltop above Gilmore Rd

About this hill , here are a couple of shots of the knoll at the top, seen from the direction of the wall.(and a little more to the side)
(and then back on top)

An interesting notation on a topo map

I have been exploring near this intersection, were Rt 9 runs east-west and Rt 495 runs north-south. I just noticed the word "Ruins" to the left of the clover-leaf. Wonder what that means?

Speaking of Dolmens...

Here is one I noticed at Madison Springs, behind the AMC hut in the pass between Mt. Madison and Mt. Adams in New Hampshire. There seemed to be a couple of others in the area. I showed this to Norman Muller one time and, interestingly, there was a corncob on the ground next to it. That white in the background is a huge vein of white quartz.

Stone wall related to a gridded rock pile site

Here is another view of that stone wall which was slightly north of a north-facing slope of the hill I explored last weekend near Gilmore Rd. Southborough, MA. You can see from the topo map placement of this feature that it runs southeast (118 magnetic) to northwest (295 magnetic) on a gradual slope beside the knoll defining the hilltop.

Here is how the lower end of the wall looks, nicely squared off.
If you look along the wall in that down-slope, northwesterly direction, you see what looks like another rock pile in line with the wall:Then going over to the pile and looking beyound it we see a few "natural" rocks continuing in that same direction.The rock pile consists of support stones holding up a flat "gunsight" with a small notch along its upper edge. From the side, you can see one of the support rocks is mostly made of quartz.
I have no doubt that this wall is ceremonial.

Coming up to the hilltop site (Gilmore Rd Southborough, MA)

So I continued up the hill heading northwest, crossed a small landing strip on top and came to an outcrop. I could see there was something on it and, as I looked around, there was evidence of rock piles. Here are some closeups:
And then there was a fine pile. Here is a view of it, facing back south towards the landing strip
Then once I got up to the very top: rock piles, evenly spaced in lines and gridlike:
These piles are visible from a boulder (behind and to the rear from the point of view of these piles) which I looked at later. Also I became aware of an interesting wall feature. Lets take a closer look at that wall.

The first and last pictures

By coincidence, though they were at different places on the hill I explored, two "sprit doors":
Let's have another look at that first one. It was on the western side of the eastern-most summit of the hill. The first hint there might be more to find.
Looking at this now I am suspicious of the rocks in the background. I must have lined them up deliberately for the shot.

Ancient perched rocks beneath MacDonald Lake at the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve, Ontario

This link is from Ros Strong, via Norman Muller.

REMOTE ONTARIO LAKE REVEALS MYSTERIOUS ANCIENT STRUCTURE
(from the blog "Thats News" http://thatsnews.blogspot.com/)

Canadian archeology is so refreshing, with their acknowledgment and genuine interest in stone structures.

Update: Norman provides these photos:

Articles at Larry Harrop's Website

http://www.larryharrop.com/
(scroll to the bottom)

A hill near Gilmore Rd Southborough, MA

I went out to this hill and ended up exploring the two eastern summits of the several shown here: I started seeing rock piles as soon as I got to around A. There is a small rock pile site strewn over about 1/2 acre of the northwest slope of the hill there, bordered on one side by a very notice-able short stretch of stone wall. This is the red line in the map and the grey line near the top of this aerial photo:[By the way, if you go to Google maps to have a look at the rest of the hill there are several other interesting wall configurations].
There are perhaps 25 small rock piles clustered on the northwest slope facing the wall, perhaps 15 more on the more level top of the hill, visible from one large glacial erratic that looks to me like a viewing position, and another small cluster on an faint outcrop that faces more to the south. These clusters are not really separate but you cannot see from one to the next over the curve of the hilltop.

So I want to show a little about this site. Starting with a couple of examples and with the wall. Here is one of the nicest piles in the cluster around the large erratic. You could look through that gap if you were sitting on the erratic:And here we are looking from the side of the same pile, but down towards the wall: And here is a quick view of the wall. It goes off towards 118 degrees magnetic to the right, 295 to the left. I'll write more about the details later. One more thing, here are three in a row:
(You know what I'm talking about.)

"Ancient Stone Towers" Moundsville, WV

Geophile
Ran across this while looking at information on Midwestern burial mounds:

There is also an array of ancient stone towers on the bluffs overlooking Moundsville and the ancient earthworks. These are basically giant stone cairns now and reportedly were towers.

. . . Thanks to Gary's fine directions, I found one, known as Indian Knob. Unfortunately, a developer very recently used the stones to build a road into his new subdivision, and only a slight amount of one edge now remains. What apparently was a huge stone mound about 30 feet or more across is now a narrow crescent of rock only four feet high. When will the destruction STOP?? Note the tall weeds across the clearing. That is all that remains of this rock mound. The clearing is its footprint.

--from this page by the estimable J.Q. Jacobs who has added so much to our knowledge of the mound sites

Appetizer