Tuesday, August 21, 2007

Rock Pile sites around Long Pond in Falmouth, MA

There are at least three rock pile sites, that I know of, around Long Pond in Falmouth - a conservation land there. I went out to re-explore one portion of the woods there and ended up crossing one of the sites I knew from before, perhaps seeing a new pile or two around the edges, and then continuing on to the path where I found the "arrowhead" the other day, and then on to a hill looking south over the north end of the pond and seeing one more suggestive combination of rocks, a kind of structure overlooking the lake.

As I first came up to the edge of one known site, I found a pile at the point of the highest source of water that drains away down into the pond.
It was nice to see a new pile for the first time in three weeks. And then I came up to a group of piles I remembered:
The piece of land where the cluster occurs is more or less surrounded by swamp and may have preserved its rock pile site because the land here was remaindered within the swamp.

Here is another pile which I thought seemed deliberately symmetric. But it could just be a coincidence.
Here was a rock-on-rock I don't remember seeing before:
But then, I pushed a little furter than before, in through the sweet pepper bush, and came to another small knoll deeper in the swamp. Here was another symmetric pile, facing west. This one seems much more deliberately symmetrical.
It is not a new rock pile site but it is nice to visit again, and it is nice to explore it more carefully and see a few new things. At this site, the rock piles are clustered at the point where water begins to drain off into a gully feeding the pond and this is rather different from the other sites I know from Falmouth, which are most often on the edges of kettle holes.

The undergrowth was pretty thick throughout in there and as I pushed through and up hill and out to the trail, I checked again (as I had been routinely checking) that my camera was in one pocket and my trail map was in another. And it wasn't. This is the map where I have marked all the sites I found in Falmouth and I was un-willing to lose, so I went back and tried to re-construct my trail. Luckily, I walked right back to it.

Back on the path I walked a ways, found that piece of quartz I wrote about yesterday, and then explored around, including being on a hill looking south over the pond. I thought it would be worth going to the "edge" of the hill to see if anything was there, and this was a little structure I saw. We are looking south towards the pond:

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