Monday, October 23, 2006

Small rock pile site - Frederick Corner Tyngsboro, MA

I am not too sure of that blue outline. I parked just shy of where the Dunstable town line is but it was also at the top of the hill and I have trouble reconciling that with the topo fragment. Then also I walked down hill west and perpendicular to the road, came to a bit of wet area and found rock piles on higher ground just beyond that wet area. Interpreting the topo lines in the fragment, there looks to be a bit of a dip between the blue outline and the road, so maybe that is about right. The piles that I found were all long-since damaged and, since they had already been destroyed, it is probably OK to publicize the site location.

Anyway, I was heading down from the road and thought the woods were increadibly trashed out from past boulder quarrying or some kind of activity that left entire slopes of rubble. Then I cut across a wetland and, seeing higher ground, thought: OK good place to look. I was immediately rewarded with this solitary pile.
It was square and evidently much broken down. I glanced around for other piles and, not seeing any, I continued in a northerly direction trying to get down to the edge of the water. After a while, all I had seen was more trashed out woods and thought I really should go back to where that one pile was and look much more carefully there.

Back in that vicinity I found another, and then another.
So I walked around, criss-crossing that area (it is a little knoll with lower wet areas around it) for about a half hour locating what felt like maybe six similar rock piles. They were square, made from uniformly larger rocks, but with structures all broken down sometime in the past. It was hard to tell exactly how many piles were there because they looked similar and only slightly different from different angles.
There was one nice one on the highest point of the knoll.
And a few more:
I could not tell if I was photo'ing the same ones multiple times. Maybe it was as many as ten piles. Here is a last one which looked either designed slightly differently or badly vandalized.
So here is an interesting type of site which I do not think I can characterize as a marker pile site, or a brookside site, or a graveyard, or an effigy site. The piles here are substantial square piles, sort of like Moosehorn Rd but much smaller. The piles seemed placed somewhat randomly in no obvious pattern.

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