Big Terraced Stone (Exit 18 Island) Waterbury CT

(Regretfully, the stones don’t show well here: http://binged.it/1s71Hd5, but I threw in the link anyway.)

      Back when February 2014 was just beginning to melt into March, I was looking to see what stone features on the landscape would first become visible – big south facing out crops often enough, some big erratic boulders that caught the sun “just so” as well. On Mondays and Fridays, I’d start my day by navigating into the morning traffic on east bound Interstate 84. On one of those mornings, I caught a glimpse of either a big boulder or perhaps an outcrop with some noticeable rows of stones possibly connected to it, over on the opposite side of the highway, near Exit 18 off of Interstate 84 west, the “Yankee Highway.” I didn’t get a good photo of that back then, but circumstance took me near there yesterday, with a “come back in half an hour” stipulation to the task I was trying to complete.

I parked in and then got out of the newest zone of the modern strip mall landscape, crossed over a bit of messy modern piles of this and that, took a chance of being run over by dashing across a piece of late 1960’s exit ramp, and found myself on a little island of what appears to be a little bit of an older landscape:

Rough site sketch, fairly inaccurate, and definitely not to scale:

(I’ve yet to spot this on any old aerial from my usual source, either in 1965: http://cslib.cdmhost.com/cdm4/item_viewer.php?CISOROOT=/p4005coll10&CISOPTR=12324 or in 1934: http://cslib.cdmhost.com/u?/p4005coll10,5904)

     Up close, I could see some sort of terrace built around (and into) the sunny southern side of an outcrop of bedrock:

One of the things I always look for in the stones that make up a stone wall – and I’ll call this terracing a stone wall – is signs of purposely shaped stones. I’ll have to say there were quite a few in this wall, at the same time acknowledging that the stone around here does naturally break into quite angular chunks. I could see some rounded stones here and there, but there seemed to be some possible signs of quarried stones of an older sort and possibly some artistic placement:

There’s no real good reason that I didn’t take a close up of what might possibly be a “single stone turtle effigy” in this segment of stones, so a crop will have to do:

(That's quite a number of fracture lines, more than at least I think would occur naturally)

Turning to the right (east), I took this fuzzy image, thinking perhaps here was another testudinate sort of structure or artwork happening, as well as some other interesting shapes like that Manitou or god stone: 

I got up close to capture an image of a possible turtle head sort of stone with some signs of possible human enhancement, the fresher looking fractures and especially the beak down placement:

And then this long, similarly colored stone caught my eye:

Closer:

I think there’s a layer of natural weathering over some human enhancement here, quite possibly to resemble, if not a turtle, then some sort of animal head, with a clearly visible eye.

Another perhaps, quite near:

And some more:

(There a lot of red in some of these stones, possibly because of fire, perhaps as scheduled  renewal ceremony or perhaps just "regular" burning as part of landscape management?)

There’s some quartz in this wall, here and there, possibly purposely displayed:

(Note the rhomboid shape on the right:)

There’s a small rectangular thing going on in this corner, handy to toss some metal junk into apparently:

Maybe this is a bird, circled in red:

Maybe these are birds too:

 I’ll leave it here for now, with a promise (or warning) of continuation…