Sunday, March 16, 2008

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.

2 comments :

pwax said...

I don't know what to make of those scratches on the rock. They look man-made but not particularly deliberate, except that the groove is uniform in depth and width.

Tim MacSweeney said...

Thanks for taking a further look at the wall - or row as I like to think of them. I have it stuck in my head that many rows are firebreaks. And I add a recent email that Herman Bender sent me:
Hello all,

I have hundreds of annotated references of the use of fire for landscape management, etc. by Native Americans in the eastern half of the US. The issue should be cultural landscape preservation, not just one group or another.

Herman

I think he is suggesting "It's all connected," much as some of my Indian friends suggest when I talk about this stuff...