More StoneWorks Around Echo Lake Milford/ Hopkinton MA.- Pt. 1

More StoneWorks Around Echo Lake Milford/ Hopkinton MA.- Pt. 1

Peter Waksman covered this site on his blog a while back.  He and his friend FFC had apparently made a field trip to the area to try and penetrate & get into the heart of Echo Lake, to see what he could find.  However, as people like myself who have researched this area know, penetrating Echo Lake isn't the easiest task at first.  First, there is alot of potential area to cover.... where to start.  Second, one will experience the areas that were quarried, specifically for pink granite that was used in buildings all over the USA and even the world, since the late 19th century which may be a turn off at first, but don't let that fool you.  Third, there are things like a police shooting range, and other private property with no tresspassing (such as the former water supply for Milford) that one has to deal with- there really isn't any reasonable places to park to get directly to the heart of Echo Lake- one has to park farther away and make a hike in to the place assuming one knows where to hike in from.  A good place to park to get to Echo Lake is the new parking lot for the Upper Charles Trail by the Milford/ Hopkinton town lines now that the Milford section of the "rail trail" is complete.

The stoneworks covered in this post are relatively close to the Echo Lake Stone Lodge/ Chamber that I have been researching since I came upon the structure on one of my hikes.  Anyway, the link to this stoneworks site I am covering in this post can be found on Peter's Rock Piles blog here- http://rockpiles.blogspot.com/2010/03/walden-woods-off-rt-85-milford-ma.html  This site only exists still today because of a wetland at the base of the ledge of this stoneworks site.  Again, no protection of the rock piles, or any sort of motivation to try and understand the rock piles.  This site is located off of Rte. 85 by the Hopkinton and Milford MA. town lines.  There is a new condo complex that has been built up here called Walden Woods, and surely quite a few things have been lost in that process.  When state archaeologist Curt Hoffman and I first tried looking for stoneworks by Echo Lake, before I came across the Chamber, we also drove into this condo complex as a place to park but it didn't turn out so well.  As Curt put it "I would never want to live in one of these condos... would you?" and also "Henry David Thoreau would be rolling over in his grave right now if he knew these developers named a condo complex named after Walden Pond."  This is very ironic, and seems to be a trick that developers use- after destroying a serene and beautiful natural landscape they will call their development/ complex something like "Deer Run", "Walden Woods" etc.

So as it is now the site of interest in this post is a spot of land that is amidst a condo complex, which would have been destroyed also if it didn't have to be surveyed and preserved under the wetlands protection act (at least that's worth something).  Here is the Department of Environmental Protection sign located at this site:

This is the attention-grabber that can be seen from the street.  A boulder placement with stone wreckage around it, what looks like what used to be a serpent wall or enclosure or a cairn around the boulder:

One of the best features of this site is this well formed and nicely sized cairn with a hollow (a design feature) in the middle of it.  A:

B:

C:

D:

E:

Nearby, this looked like an interesting stone placement/ configuration:

Another cairn:

Cairn at a vantage point view A:

B (the light is reflecting off the stone):

C:

Another cairn at the site nearby to the last one:

The remains of an obviously ancient stone-wall that runs up to a boulder, a classic feature when looking at what are pre-colonial walls.  This is also at the same vantage point close by to the cairns from the above pics.  However, this boulder is located more around the outer parameters of the ledge before the terrain drops down into a wetland, so here we see a stone wall "fortification" above the wetland.  View A:

B:

A very nice rock ledge at this site:

Part 2 is on it's way.  Then stay tuned for some new exciting revelations about the Echo Lake Stone Lodge/ Chamber in this area that I have been researching.