The Stone-worked Spring

This is on another river on the opposite side of town from me. There's lots of stone remnants there too, including this "Stone-worked Spring on Hooppole Hill" whose name suggests "a place where coopers cut hickory bands for their barrels." I "found" the Spring perhaps in 1997 0r 1998 - my notebook has no dates on my drawings and rubber cemented photos. A client, of an antique dealer for whom I did lots of work, was having a wedding and I was to wax and touch-up every bit of furniture in the very large house. It involved some "drying time," so I took some "off the clock" breaks to wander the many stone rows on the property, camera in hand. I took lots of photos because there was all sorts of interesting things going on - terraces and ancient trees, stone worked springs and even more stone worked springs. Here's a surviving photograph, scanned from the notebook:

Pretty bad... old film and no fire extinguisher.

I'll explain; I was in the process of moving stuff from a room in my house to the barn when I realised I needed to pick up my daughter. I parked very close to the Home of a Antique Dealer where she was working, filling in for her friend who regularly did cleaning there. Then I drove up to the Hill to remove some clamps and finish up the last piece of furniture I was working on, parking right next to a gigantic barn full of exercise equipment and stuff. Then I drove my mobile workshop down the hill to the Spring I wanted to photograph with some old film I was taking a chance on being good still, planning to drop my daughter and my two dogs back home before dropping off the exposed film to be printed and bringing my video camera to the repair shop and making a deposit at the bank and probably 27 other things I had to do.

While I was taking pictures, I turned to my daughter to ask her to get into the photo for some size perspective, but she looked at me wide eyed, struggling to speak and instead just pointed to my van. A stream of burning gasoline was dripping from under my engine and running down hill underneath the length of the vehicle. About 30 seconds later, time enough to get the dogs out the back doors, the van was pretty close to totally engulfed in flames.

I quickly replanned my day and ran to a house to call the fire department...

So I finally went back on January 10, 2007 and took these new photos.

In the top left you see the edge of several acres of hayfield; to the top right the lowest of terraces marked by a stone row, perhaps originally connected to the Spring.

At bottom right is the stream that flows out from the Stoneworked Spring...

Some different views:

Details:

To me it seems to be stone effigies, mostly turtles, that are incorporated into the design of the Stone Worked Spring. Some faces are quite striking, some carapaces very large while others are small, and I see different forms every time I look...

And an old picture, carapace and head stone.

I couldn't find it yesterday...