
From water to water, across one of the islands located in the long pond midst the drainage course at the Northern edge of the Long Plain glacial outflow delta, in the 2 1/2 mile narrow ravine between Mt Toby and Leverett's bedrock, ancient people probably laid out the ten-foot-wide based ribbon of large tumbled stones that is over 900 feet long, tapering down into water at each end. Across the island, at about NW 340 degrees, stones were carefully piled on that wide foundation to create what was possibly a rocky ‘road bed’ three feet off the ground and six feet wide on top, with the height reduced and tapered at and down into the water. The construct has no known function.
There is a lot of historical and geologic information here to study. For perhaps thousands of years, people passing East of Mt Toby proceeding North from the deep sand plains walked the same path between water’s edge and the stark white bedrock ridge with the “fishpond” on top. This corridor trail, later becoming a carriage-way, was the only viable passageway to get North from the Plain to what is now Montague and Lake Pleasant (and some smaller peneplains). The ancient long pond right in the Long Plain Brook, the edge of which the trail followed for 2 1/2 miles, had been filling in with sediment for thousands of years, but it wasn’t until 1867, when lengthy rail road fill embankments connected these islands to land that, for the first time, the 1795 settlers, the Asa Lee Fields, denied prior access to the islands for their first 72 years, could pasture the islands and build a ‘colonial’ stone wall somewhat north of the rocky roadbed, stretch barbed wire along the ritual roadbed top, even pave a roadway with small stone between the two islands. The RRR (‘Rocky Ritual Roadway’?) remains, but it predated and was breached in 1867 by the Rail Road that connected the islands to land.
As the beavers have returned the echo of the now-mostly-filled-in ancient long pond between South Toby and the Fishpond Rocks bedrock, new interpretations of this unexplained stone work are being voiced.
I have to print this 48 pg book and its covers on my computer and have them bound at Collective Copies, so $16 plus $2 First Class = $18 doesn't pay for labor, inks, etc, but I want this in the hands of people genuinely interested in this ancient thermopylae and its proof of pre-colonial people's apparently ceremonial imprint.
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