Chapman Mill Pond 2026 (Clinton/Westbrook CT)

 Along the Menunketesuck River on a Wednesday in July

  One and a half years later, almost to the day, my Valentine's Day 2025 Achilles Tendon injury allowed me to finally begin “walking like I used to” once again. I can even “walk the yellow line” without failing the sobriety test even though when I walk I still look more than a little bit like some old man unsuccessful at making you think he hasn’t been drinking.

  My wife Roberta and I parked at the end of Chapman Mill Road in Clinton CT and walked the trail into Westbrook which sounds impressive until you look at the map and see that the “border crossing” isn’t really that far at all. We had been here before, having canoed up to the dam on a high tide many years ago and another visit sometime after the parcel became an open space property in 2004.

 My wife actually spotted the first possible Indigenous Ceremonial Stone Landscape feature, an anthropomorphic boulder that seems to look toward the sunset. The dappled sunlight filtering through the trees would have made a terrible photograph, so I leave it for a return visit at another time.

 I spotted the second feature, a probable flat-topped triangular boulder head snake effigy emerging from a boulder outcrop.

 

Perhaps the apparent body is also composed of several snakes, entwinned perhaps, one raising its head, another boulder with a little niche of sorts that creates the illusion of an eye in the boulder:

I looked around the All Trails site for the Pond for some photographs of “stone walls” in the Open Space Preserve and got some interesting images:

 I lifted a little historical history as well:

  But it was at the YouTube that I found the sort of “stone walls” I was looking for, “the tossed under wooden rail fences,” the “too low walls,” the “Lace Walls,” – the undulating walls with the “snakes and turtle” and other Iconography that may reflect the roles of these culturally stacked stone features that speak to land use by Indigenous Peoples over thousands and thousands of years.

  Out Doors with John: https://youtu.be/VygUih0YuWs?si=xEeluk7FiQgb66Fy

 So thank you John! I look forward to seeing the Stewart B. McKinney video and, once I get this new hip in a couple weeks, I look forward to being able to handle the rough northern limits where the stonework looks most interesting – provided I wake up after the surgery, provided it will all be so easy to recover, so good to be free from the constant pain…

“Káhtôquwuk in Narragansett, kodtuquag(kash) in Massachusett, and Kodtonquag(kash) in Nipmuk. They all mean "it has been stacked up." - Nohham

Skoguonk Skog/Snake and “spirit being ending”

Nohham”s suggestion: Skoguonk kodtongquag/Skoguonk Káhtôquwuk (the short “snake effigy” constructions?)

A little "imagist poem" in stone that might say: "It has been stacked up as a prayer to the Snake Being"

 

https://www.alltrails.com/trail/us/connecticut/chapman-mill-pond-loop/photos

 And some aerial images: 

From 1934:

(My mom's house is on the image:)

Tree on the Highway

and the Chapman Mill Pond Road Overpass

from the TV NEWS: