The Deer Path “Stone Wall” (Weston CT) Part One:

A Culturally Stacked Row of Stones on a Modern Day Property Line 

   Six months and a couple days past the Valentine’s Day Achille’s Tendon Incident, I found myself traveling down some old turnpikes and trails to have dinner with someone in someplace I’d only been to once before. The town was one of those fancy Connecticut towns where former farmland turned to fancy suburban houses for the wealthy, and of course I was looking at all the various forms of “stone fencing” reflective of those time periods my critics believe I’m unaware of, but as I drive along the old roads, I see the Indigenous Stonework remnants still in place here and there, just like just about everywhere in Connecticut. I glimpse old trail border rows of stones and spot some Stone Prayers (hidden in plain sight as they say), up by some “broken” rough and rocky uplands, a couple Stone Serpents with big stone heads guarding them, up near "The Devil's Den" along the way. 

(I keep looking for a view of them on Google maps and Google Earth where street views are available but the foliage gets in the way and I can't show you a good view of that.)

  Just before we pull into the driveway at our destination, I note that there is a “stone wall property border fence” hugging one edge of the yard…

    The ground was fairly level along this row of stones and I finally got a chance to hobble along the first “stone fence” I’ve been able to "walk like an old man pretending he's not drunk and failing to do so" along in half a year. The next day, at home, I check the aerial photos for 1934 and see the cultural snapshot of farmland that’s mostly “cow and apples” related, with probably tobacco plots and woodlots as additional cash crops. I see that the rows of stacked stones sort of point to present day magnetic north and I know that is commonly assumed to be a sign that somebody used a compass to plot these lines (long lots?) in the post contact period, as they say…

     (But the declination changes over time and the artificial intelligence overview that pops up these days on a web search surprises me by saying that “In 1700, magnetic declination in Woodbury, CT, was approximately 7 to 8 degrees west of true north. This means a compass needle would point 7 to 8 degrees to the left of geographic north.” I don't know what to think about that...)

     Still, these initial observations on a single visit makes me really wonder if I am seeing pre-contact Indigenous Stonework of undetermined age in the Paugussett Homeland or later stonework created in the last 335 or so years after the Puritan/Pequot War when settler colonists were granted land to be turned into private properties and farms practicing European style methods of agriculture. 

Close to the Deer Path Road, there's a large "triangular" boulder in the row of stones that could be or "could have been seen as" an example of a boulder-type of snake head (like hundreds of others in many other places).

Another one, as I "walked the line:"

With an overlay of an eye and a deer horn:

I thought, "Interesting: looks like someone wanted to see if this stone would be a workable piece of stone - as if one were perhaps a flint knapper" as a cultural clue or something. I'm not a flint knapper or a geologist so I don't really know if it's "not good:"

Note the bowl-like stone on top of another stone by but not on or in the "fence:"

Nearby were these broken non-flinty stones!!

Of course when one fnds oneself on Turtle Island, 

One should of course be looking for possible turtles as a cultural clue:

Or a possible snake head with a possible "jewel" on its possible head as well:

An interesting feature: 

And then there is this:

A Segregated Segement trapped inside two "pool fences."

Take a peek at the Google Earth, the old aerial photos,

and the recent CT LiDAR images:

1934:

Something lifted from somewhere:

Take a look at this map from 1975: