Thursday, October 04, 2007

The hilltop at last

Last Sunday I found a fair sized marker pile site on top of a hill in Hopkinton MA. At first, in the approach, it was just a minor site until I got to the eastern shoulder of the hilltop and started seeing more substantial piles and clear relationships between the piles:And here is one with a quartz blaze - supported rock pile, the same distance from the next pile in the background as I was seeing between many of the piles. But this was the only one with a noticeable piece of quartz.And then I see a big pile and know this is a more substantial site that I realized.
And then here is a house foundation. I should stop at the State Park station and ask if they know who lived up here.
And then I found some nice ledges, which I'll report separately. And then although the rock piles seemed bounded by a stone wall, I went across the wall into a blank area just to see if the piles respected the boundary of the wall. Walking westward at first there were no more rock piles but then I did get to some other rock piles, and the western shoulder of the hill. There, larger boulders near the edge were strung together like jewels on a stone wall necklace which zig-sagged around the hilltop in an orderly fashion.

Sitting on top of one of these boulders, here is the view roughly north:
And the view roughly southwest:
Maybe the wall enclosed 5 acres and more than fifty rock piles? There were also some straight walls coming in from the sides into the enclosed hilltop area. There were some nice piles in there:
And the kind of rock-on-rock that would have required main strength to create.Imagine how happy I was to discover when I came home that this hilltop was actually the smaller of three hilltops forming an massively larger hill than I realized. Did I just scratch the surface? Stay tuned for next Saturday's report.

In the meantime, I promise a post about the ledges on the east side and another about some of the vistas in there, where you can see from pile to pile with a sense of regular spacing suggesting as it does an astronomical purpose. I do not believe this has anything to do with burials.

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