Wednesday, November 15, 2006

More Thoughts about "The Map Thing"


Since I just happened on these files from recent years, I thought I'd say a little bit more about maps and what's really on the ground.


I'm not going to tell you exactly where it is.
But it is on a floodplain field.
When English settlers moved here in the late 1600's, they took over and put under cultivation the already cleared fields that stretched for four or five or more miles south of here.
They didn't take over this "meadow" because there were Native People living in the area who were already planting here.

You can't really see some important water features above, except for that thin blue line which is actually a ditch that diverts the stream from where it originally flowed...

So here's the (blurry) aerial photo I got from somewhere sometime of the same place.

And here's my enhancement:

The blue is an intermittent sort of stream. There was a 100-year flood back in August 1997 that "flushed out" this stream. The red lines are a serpentine row of stones and some remnants the flood uncovered. The purple is zigzag stone rows.
The green is apple trees; some are very old, some sprouted from old roots of old ones.
The yellow triangle is a sort of solar calendar that marks the summer solstice and and the two equinoxes.



An old drawing, not very good since it doesn’t show how serpentine the row is, is reproduced below.

Hmmm. I seem to have drawn a mound in there that doesn't exist. Perhaps I was interrupted before I could draw a line from that mound to the "Buried Turtles" spot. My idea was that the farmer who robbed the graves probably found it easy to pile the donation stones in a straight line running north and south as a property fence, to which more modern wire fences have been added. Some of the chestnut posts still remain to today too.

Forever removed also is soild proof that the Burial Grounds ever existed; it's now nothing more than a Grandfather Story, illustrated with an old woodcut in an old history.

No comments:

Post a Comment