Not surprisingly, I found row cairns with some very interesting features. My thoughts about who constructed them and for what purpose were obscured by a few things.
Niches or fence rail holes?
This one is complete with wood fence rails still in place, but what's with that red rock?
Manitou stones or just plain old field clearing stones that settled out in that funny position?
Rock piles on boulders: Native American or a settler finding the best way to consolidate field clearing stone?
And, why on earth would someone build a cairn at the end of a stone wall? Two views:
Given, the stone wall probably went in after the row cairns, but still, why not incorporate the cairn into the wall?This piqued my interest more than the others. It's short stretches of stone row above an outcrop. Ahhhh....something I can relate to (the outcrop is just off to the left):
Just below that outcrop, but above and between the row piles and stone wall, I found these interesting rock piles. Best described as two large rock piles and one cairn, here are some photos. This first is the most telling. It is a rock pile with a hollow and, dare I say, there is an opening that faces directly toward the cairn in the background. Click on the image for a better view:
Here is the second rock pile near the cairn. I did not see a hollow in this pile, but it is relatively equidistant from the cairn, but in a different direction:
A close up of the cairn:
I found a nice old foundation nearby, which I will probably post later on, but I am not convinced that the rows along the outcrop and the cairn near the rock piles (one with hollow) are related to the foundation and farm. My reasoning is that, if you look at the stones in the cairn near the rock piles (photo above), besides the fact that they are not in any row for fence purposes, the cairn also contains very small stones similar to those found a the Ludlow Creek site. If agrarian, what would be the purpose of this cairn? Finally, this picture of one of the "fence post cairns" wins honorable mention. I think the snow does a nice job of framing it, naturally:
4 comments:
These are just beautiful and love the sparing use of red in the one cairn.
Now that I look at that cairn photo (the one with the red) it looks a little bit like a turtle at the base. I do find red stones placed here and there in this area, but quartz, not so much.
Very nice. I would love to see other pictures of the two piles (one with a hollow) when the snow is off.
I will probably be able to get over there this spring. It is right across the valley from where I live. That entire range is covered with rock piles. There is a swamp about a half mile to the south of this site (1800 feet in elevation which is a bit unusual) and the orion effigy is overlooking that swamp. To the north (a mile and a quarter) is the hay field with the calendar in it (the one that I posted the Google Earth aerial view and it appears to have alignments for the soltices and equinox).
One of my favorite things to see is the mist rising off the swamp when the weather changes.
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