Saturday, January 25, 2014

In and around the green zone at the proposed Ashford Woods Subdivision

Graphic by Steve Raggie, Waterbury Republican-American  1955 USGS above it with the town-line shown.
And I’ll throw in this 1920 photo from the Watertown Historic Society, looking up at the hills where this site is located. I’m trying to decide if I can identify the right one, an orchard and a meadow perhaps, a woodlot above it. I think it might be about in the center of the photo:
I walked in on Tuesday, just ahead of a winter storm, wishing I had done so a day earlier when it was 20 degrees warmer, at the proposed new road that would lead into the proposed development. It might be that the old property line that created the eastern border of the Georgetown Dr. Development property appears on the 1934 aerial photo below as a zigzag “fence” along a former orchard, and I’ve put some approximate green lines in there that probably aren’t exact in there. The town line dashed black line on the topo is most likely the eastern border of the development. There’s a blue line of a small stream and a brown line of a still existing segment of a very substantial stone row in front of a brown house that will appear later on in this post. There’s also some compromised boulder constructions that are along Bunker Hill Road.

A couple of signs at the proposed road way entrance:


Above: recent brush piles, probably some recent stones dumped on possibly much older stone piles. It’s a human tendency to dump stuff on already existing piles – the Alice’s Restaurant theory of adding to a pile rather than moving the old one because it the easy thing to do. My Chicken Yard Mounds are a good example of this {http://wakinguponturtleisland.blogspot.com/search?q=chicken+yard}. Below: two views of another pile: 

A Boulder by the row:

I wandered to the east and north a bit until this "large cobble stack” caught my attention. It’s at a seep and that might be what’s left of some stone work around this little spring. That rock formation above it is probably that elevation shown just to the right of the town line on the topo map: 
Some more views:
Note the flat “metate-like” stone (I couldn't brush away the frozen leaves):

Just a little north of this stack, I noticed some barely visible row of large cobbles/small boulders:

And another nearby stack and a boulder with a bowl-like depression in it:
– and a possible masher stone that matches up pretty well with that bowl, now that I think of it, placed in turtle head position in front of the boulder, much like this photograph from Dr. Luci Lavin’s new book:
The stack close up:
And the stack in Turtle Vision:
Another stack?
Another Turtle?
To be continued, moving out of Watertown and the Green Zone, as a zigzag stone row remnant became barely visible...
..and back into the Green where it continues:

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