Rock piles on a farm

I visited a farm with some very large rock piles this past weekend. This is in the Delaware watershed. The area is very, very rocky and this is an active pasture, yet I can't help but wonder if some of these piles are something more than field clearing.

Here is one of the large rock piles, with some stacking evident:


There are two piles out of four large piles in the field which I would say are vertical faced on the eastern side (uphill).

Here's the first vertical faced pile:

Here's the second, just a little farther up the hill:

This picture captures the two vertical faced piles, with the large pile from the first picture in the background.

Then, if you were to look well off to the left of the picture above, you can see this rock pile:

The pile in the previous photo has an interesting stone in the vicinity of the stacked part of the pile:

There are two places where the stone wall goes over boulders, which appears to be colonial or practical, but nonetheless beautiful.


Just uphill from the pasture, on the other side of the stone wall, there are more rock piles in the woods. The pictures are darker because the sun had already set when I took these.


The next two pictures are of the same rock pile. First from the side:

Then from the front:

At the top of the hill...continued from March 23rd post

Going further uphill from the last site, there were a few features. A large rock on a boulder. There were rocks all around the ground on the downhill side of this boulder. No comment on whether this is natural or man-made.

A crude stone row on the western ridge just above the boulder:

Another crude stone row on the eastern ridge:

And these stone features were also on the eastern side of the mountain. Single rocks or multiple rocks on boulders:




A single rock pile:

Small site above two brooks

I posted this site at the Rock Piles blog today. Here are some additional photos.

This picture is of the winding stone row that is connected to a straight stone wall. It is taken facing uphill, right at the spot where they connect, with the stone wall just off to the right.
This is looking downhill, with the stone wall to the left. Notice that niche-like structure in the center of the picture?

Here is a close up of that structure:

And here is another that is also along the winding stone row.

Here is a close up of the small wedged rock near the end of the stone wall:

And here is the larger wedged rock, this view looking downhill, toward one of the brooks.

This is the crude stone row that runs east-west. This view is looking down the row, toward the brook.

This is looking uphill a the row. There are a couple of rocks in front of the breakout, and the row is just above and behind the breakout.

This is taken along where the breakout or runoff runs down and there is what appears to be a rock pile here, although some areas are just "rocks all over" so it is hard to tell if this is man-made.

This rock stack is a bit more obvious.

Mountaintop prayer seat?

I'm not sure if that's what it is, but it's picture #15 below. It just seemed so fragile, so precarious (in person). Here is a map of the area, with photo numbers and directions the photos were taken marked on the map:

The two small circles between the 8 and the 7 on the map are to mark a few rocks that were visible, but I can't be sure if they continued on to form a stone row. The snow was too deep to see a lot of detail.
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