Monday, December 22, 2008

Near Nobscott Hill - Subdury/Framingham MA

I have not had much luck exploring around Nobscott Hill but there are plenty of little nooks scattered around on this large hill and I have heard that there are rock piles somewhere in there. So I keep exploring there, a bit at a time. I had some small luck several weeks ago when I went down into a valley to the northeast after circling the top of the hill. Along most brooks in Massachusetts there are traces of fallen down structures, often old dams and mill works. I am often uncertain if I am looking at something ceremonial or something mill related and this was the case when I came across a tumbled down rock pile at the edge of a wetland. I took a couple of pictures as this was the first potentially interesting rock pile I found in several weekends of looking.Nearby the hillside was dug out like a sand or gravel borrow pit and these stones might have been discards from that operation. Except that they were all comparable in size and not lying at an "angle of repose". So perhaps this was ceremonial or, next to the brook, perhaps something related to a mill. Also this was an isolated rock pile and I tell myself to always be suspicious of isolated piles. We do not really have ceremonial rock piles so much as ceremonial sites containing rock piles. At first glance, here, there was no such site.

But I continued downstream and, a few yards later, came across another similarly situated pile:
Again there is an uncertainty about this pile but, if you look in the background, you can see something else. Here are a couple of pictures of a structure consisting of rocks on top of a split rock, with a tree growing up in the split: Nothing mill-like about that. So I looked around some more nearby and came across another structure having nothing to do with mill operations or gravel pits - seemingly a ceremonial structure:Here is a not-too-good view of the site with the last pile to the far left, the split rock three quarters of the way to the right and that initial pile to the far right.The wetland and brook are beyond the stone wall. In the end I concluded this was a ceremonial site. But there were other other tumbled down strctures that really did not look like rock piles, so I am still not sure.

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