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Of the half dozen or so major cairn sites in Vermont, the one in
Stockbridge, near the border with Barnard, is among the most
intriguing, probably because it is one of the least known and explored,
and seems to hold considerable potential.
Located on the side of a mountain off Perkin’s
Brook, about
a mile hike in on a logging road, it was first explored by Ernie
Clifford, a Vermont native, about ten years ago, who had heard about it
from a hunter friend. Ernie then showed it to me one
beautiful
April morning four years ago, at which time I took some photographs of
two of the largest cairns but didn’t spend much time
exploring
the area. 2003 was the year when I was first introduced to
the
major cairn sites in Vermont by Ernie, and I was simply doing a lot of
looking, and documenting as many sites photographically as I
could. But as I began to be more familiar with certain types
of
cairns and paid greater attention to how they were constructed and
located in the landscape, I thought back on the Stockbridge site and
how little I really knew about it. Upon reflection, it seemed
to
be very important with respect to the other sites I had seen,
particularly how certain cairns seemed morphologically similar to
others I had seen elsewhere, and I was determined to have a much closer
look at it and probe the woods around the site.
On September 21, 2007, Ernie agreed to guide a small group of
four to the site. We met at a parking spot at the beginning
of
the logging road, and then walked up a steep slope by switchbacks to a
nearly level area that had been recently logged. Here the
road
split: the more recently used road veered to the right and eventually
past a foundation and underground chamber of an old abandoned colonial
farm. Instead we went straight ahead on an abandoned spur
that
was slowly being swallowed up by trees and shrubs on either
side.
After about ten or fifteen minutes of easy walking we were supposedly
in the area of the cairns, at an elevation of 1600 feet. Four
years ago, one beautiful April day, I visited this site when the trees
and bushes had not yet blossomed, and I could make out some of the
stone cairns from the road. But now, in late summer, the
dense
foliage obscured everything beyond a few feet. Ernie,
however,
knew just where to enter the woods, and after some easy bushwhacking we
were at the first large structure in a pine grove.
Approaching it from the south, the cairn didn’t
look
like much. Young saplings had fallen against the south end of
it,
which sloped gradually to the ground, and some stones had been knocked
out of place by repeated tree falls. As we walked
counterclockwise to the north facing side, the construction was less
disturbed and impressive looking (Fig. 1). Here I was
impressed
by the intentional directionality of the well constructed face of the
cairn as opposed to the other side. I had seen this before at
Parker Woodland in Coventry, Rhode Island, where five different cairns
had their well constructed side facing east. The Stockbridge
example faced north, and I am at a loss to explain this, as I am the
large cairn with the quartz cobble (see page 2, Fig. 11), which also is north
facing.
The cairn was roughly rectangular in shape with its axis
oriented
east-west. It measured 10.7m long, 2.3m wide and 1.4m high
(35’ x 7.5’ x 4.5’). Some
balsams and hemlocks
perhaps thirty to forty years old had fallen against it, criss-cross
fashion (Fig. 2). This was not a benign looking
environment. The ground was uneven and characteristic of
“pillow and cradle” topography that Wessels (1997)
describes as being caused by periodic tree blow-downs over a long
period of time; there was no evidence that this area had ever been
cultivated, although by the size of the trees in the area, tree
harvesting had definitely occurred only decades before.
Fig, 1
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Fig. 2
|
The stones comprising the cairn appeared to be local schist
that
cleaved in broad horizontal planes that permitted easy
stacking. Considerable lichen and moss growth had
formed on
the surface of some exposed stones on top, which compared quite
favorably with the thick mats of moss that a group of us had seen on
five cairns near the summit of Glastenbury Mountain in southern Vermont
(Fig. 3), which we concluded predated the construction of the fire
tower and Long Trail to the summit between 1913 and 1930. On
the
east side of the cairn was a short extension or
‘tail’ with
a diagnostic cobble of quartzite on top (Fig. 4) that reminded me of
similar stone extensions to some cairns at the Smith cairn site in
Rochester, Vermont. There, some of the extensions seemed to
reach
out to connect with springs that flowed in wet seasons (Fig. 5), but
here there was no apparent water source.
I have no idea why this large cairn and the others were
built. To me, they are monuments of some kind, although this
is
only a hunch and is not based on any factual evidence. It is obvious,
though, that considerable effort went into gathering and then piling
the stones, which may have required a team of workmen, especially to
move especially large stones that must weigh hundreds of pounds,
especially the one to the far left in Figure 1. But where did
the
stones come from? There are no concentrations of loose stone
on
the ground in the area, and the terrain in the vicinity of the cairns
does not look as though it was ever tilled, which was the main means of
forcing stones to the surface through frost action. Without
tilling, stones will stay put in the ground. So the source of
the
stones remains a mystery.
A bit further to the north, and in a depression near the cart
path, nearly out of sight, was an impressive, slightly wedge-shaped
cairn as seen from the side (Fig. 6), which as one went around to the
right, presented a tightly constructed façade (Fig.
7). I
vaguely remembered this cairn from my first trip to the Stockbridge
site, but now I was able to measure and record it
photographically. It was 2m wide by 1.5m high (6.5’
x
5’).
Fig. 6
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Fig. 7
|
From there we walked north along the cart path to the bottom
of a
pine knoll, at the base of which was a terrace-like construction of
stones measuring 2.6m long by l.5m high by .8m high (8.5’ x
5’ x 2.6’) built against the slope (Fig.
8). Above
this construction, and on top of the knoll, was a large cairn (Fig.
9). The combination of the small terrace construction and the
large cairn reminded me of similar arrangements I had seen at the Smith
site in Rochester, such as this small cairn at the base of a knoll,
above which was a terrace wall surrounding a low stone mound (Fig.
10). This arrangement and juxtaposition further emphasized
the
directional orientation of the features and how one should approach
them: both examples were much more impressive if seen and approached
from below.
Copyright © 2007 by Norman E. Muller
