A cellar hole from last year

I've been thinking about this cellar hole a lot lately, especially in light of the conversation taking place at the Rock Piles blog about cellar holes.
It bothered me when I found it, enough to take several pictures, many of which came out blurry and dark. The stick in the pictures is my 4 foot hiking stick. The hole is not very large, for a cellar hole. However, there is one gigantic stone in the center of the hole that looked to me like it was a doorstep or mantle. Yet, this flat stone is in the center, like it could have been a roof, instead of to one side as you would expect with a doorstep. It is also mounded up on at least one side of the cellar hole, or it might be better to describe it by saying the cellar hole was not built in an area that is flat all around.

I'm going to go back out here and look around some more, but if you're interested in what I posted about other features at this site in September of 2008, the link to that post is here. There are colonial features in this area, but what explains this strange cellar hole?

Scarlet Tananger

He stuck around long enough for me to get a couple of pictures, one with the zoom and one without (but I cropped it to get a close up of the bird). There are quite a few very large oak trees in this area, as well as a nice break out zone.

Three stone walls near a spring

Here is a wall I've driven by a few times and have been amazed at how steep it is here and why anyone would want to build a stone wall on such a steep grade.

This is taken from the dirt road, looking down. It doesn't do the grade justice. It's very steep here:

The first wall is not very long and ends here, just a short distance from the road. The second wall starts, attached to a boulder that is half underground. You can just see the beginning of the second wall off to the right in this photo:

This is a picture of where the second wall attaches to the half underground boulder:

And this is the end of the second wall.

The third wall starts just off of the second wall, making the opening between the two look something like a cart path.

Here is a picture of the end of the third wall. There is a spring runoff in the foreground, right where this wall ends.

This is a close up of the end stone on the last wall:


This video is 4.5 minutes long and is of my walk back up toward the road, past the two lower walls and around the boulder:



A couple of things. First, I did pick up the tire. Second, in the video I referred to the stones under the boulder to the right of the "boulder attached to the wall" as a split, but I'm not certain if that is truly a split rock under there or two separate stones. I have to go back with a flashlight and have a better look under that boulder. This site is on the south eastern end of a mountain (near the base), just above Steam Mill Branch (creek).

Also, I was kind of disappointed when I found this. Disappointed that the second wall appears to be attached to the boulder so as to make something like a pathway between the first and second walls (colonial looking). Disappointed that the boulder attached to the wall appears to be more than half buried by the bank. I kept thinking it would look so much more impressive if the boulder was exposed. But as I've been thinking about this since I found it, and mentally digesting it, what makes that middle wall interesting is that it looks like a serpent going underground.

Stone wall, Johnny Brook

A long ride up a one lane dirt trail to the top, and I was disappointed with what I found. First, because I've heard there are cairns somewhere in Johnny Brook. Second, on the west side of the trail, there is a small area to hike and it was thoroughly logged before it was sold to the city, so there was not much to see, although the area looked promising on the map. Here is one rock pile that I found on the west side of the trail (my 4 ft hiking stick in the photo, to keep the seedling out of the way to show that crack in the bottom rock):
Over to the east side, there is a stone wall going east-west. Although the ends of the wall are not connected to any other wall, there are two walls going north-south, connected near the middle. That, along with the barbed wire, gave the area a very agrarian look.

So, rather than post nothing this week, I thought I'd post some pictures of this very nice wall and area.
(Half meter stick in photo below)
Two spots where the north-south walls meet this east-west wall (this photo and the next):
If you click on this photo to enlarge it, you can see something very artistic here. The semi-upright rocks along the top of the wall lean toward the junction of the two walls.
Where the wall goes uphill, just off to the side of this outcrop (next 2 pictures):


The eastern end of the wall.
I couldn't follow the north-south walls because that land is posted. Here are a few things just off the wall.

My favorite (notice the outcrop in the background):

More from the last site and some comparisons

I didn't get out hiking last weekend, so here are some additional photos from two weeks ago. First, some pictures of the same mountaintop from this post.

First, this stacking (or maybe it's a wedge)...
...which reminds me of a couple of rock structures at this site which look similar to the first picture. The wedge near the creek, just downhill on on the opposite (west) side of the mountain:

Then this, which is also around the "ring" of the mountaintop, a little further to the south than the first picture. I captioned it "a single rock pile" in the last post, but now I'm wondering about the intent of that middle stone:

Also on the mountaintop, near the ridge, this single rock covering a crack in a boulder. In this first picture, I reduced the shadow to enhance the picture:

The opposite side from the photo above:
The dog seems to add something to that photo.

And this is a distant view, with a rock pile in the foreground. There were a few rock piles near there and some made it hard to distinguish between the crude stone row or single (or stretched out) rock pile:

Then, back down to the creek area, I found another rock pile not far from a short stone row:

Here are some standing stones from two weeks ago. Two in the area of the runoff, the first one I wondered about because I thought it is in a runoff area, based on the rocks all around.

If you click on this photo to enlarge it, it gives a better view of how the long axis of this standing stone is parallel to something like a runoff area.
The second appeared a bit more deliberate. It seems to have a shoulder to the right in this photo, which is a little blurry (half meter stick is in the photo):
Then this distant view which shows the stone's location at this site. It is right in the shadow of a tree. There is a swamp behind me in this picture. The swamp is a straight walk north about a quarter of a mile or so.

Then this last standing stone is at a different site, but it is not far from the prior pictures. I would say the two sites are about a half mile apart (maybe less) and they are separated by a seasonal dirt road.

Above a creek, below a road

Here is a small part of something I found this weekend. The video is of this little bit of stone wall that is mostly destroyed because of the road. The road is a recent construction, as it is not on the 1965 USGS map and/or ACME mapper. It is a seasonal, limited use road. The video starts at a small bit of stone wall and ends looking upstream, toward a larger section of somewhat intact stone wall:



In the video, when I was talking about some of the rocks having been brought in to construct the road, my belief is that the red shale on the bank was used as part of the road bed and tumbled down.

Also, of the sites I mentioned in the video, where I was pointing, the first one is a site downstream that I have yet to post about. The second one (upstream and above where two creeks meet), I posted about here and here. I'm starting to consider that this site is not as small as I originally thought, if the quartz rocks, rock piles, wedged rocks, bits of stone wall that don't connect to anything, crude stone row around the majority of the circumference of the mountaintop, and other things I've been finding over there are somehow connected.

I walked over to that second stretch of stone wall, a bit further upstream, and found a nice sized quartz rock in the stone wall:



Just a little further upstream, this pair of rock piles that gave a sense of pile gap pile, with my back to the stream and the bits of stone wall that remained, just uphill near where the truck is parked.



But, I couldn't stick around for a closer look because a hen turkey had just flown off her nest that was just a bit to the right in the last photo. I didn't look to see if she had eggs yet, I just left as fast as I could so she would come back.

I'm going to post some more photos of both the upstream and downstream sites later this week.

The Fort Stanwix Treaty Line - 1768

The internet link to this document does not exist any longer, so first a reference to the title and authors:

Then, the "Historical Background Information" section:









Here's a link to additional information on the Fort Stanwix Treaty Line: Early Recognized Treaties with American Indian Nations

There is reference to "carrying place" in this document (you can search the document with that term and it comes up 7 times).

Here is another good link, with a map of the Treaty Line: Treaty of Fort Stanwix - Wikipedia

If you click on the map in the Wikipedia article, to enlarge it, notice the very straight portion of the treaty line that connects the West Branch of the Delaware River at Cookose (Deposit, NY) to the junction of the Susquehanna and Unadilla Rivers at "Old Unadilla" (Unadilla/Sidney, NY) on the map, and then the line continues north following the Unadilla River. Compare that line to this map:



The area where I spend most of my time exploring lies to both the east and west of the Treaty Line. There is no major river connecting the two "carrying places". So, I have to ask myself, is it no surprise that there is so much to find here, between the rivers?