Here is a complex site including Stone
Embrasures at Great Brook Farm in Carlisle. This is a state forest
open to the public. As you enter the farm driveway and park, get out and
walk all the way to the end of the field behind the farm. Go to
the northeastern corner of this field and head into the woods and uphill.
You will see bedrock ridges and gullies in between.
Walk eastward up a few of these gullies and you will soon come across
beautifully constructed stone embrasures, made from the local schist bedrock
which splits in flat plates. We met a woman earlier who, as a long time
explorer of the woods around Great Brook Farm, had researched these and
other structures in the libraries of Carlisle and Concord. It was she that
directed me to the location of the embrasures, saying that the only reference
she and her husband could find was to Bronson Alcott's "Farm in Lowell"
which was part of the "Underground Railway". This part of Carlisle was
part of Lowell at the time. She described underground chambers that I did
not find, and the embrasures I did find would mostly be appropriate for
a person seated but not prone. So I question that this explains these stone
embrasures.
More recently I asked a ranger at the park what was known about these
embrasures, and was told that they were only eight years old and had been
"built by a stone mason teaching an apprentice how to work with stone...the
park didn't know about it until after". I am diappointed that these are
not older, but given how the structures are blended naturally with their
surrounding and in many cases are not examples of any practical stone masonry,
it is hard to believe this story at face value. What is taught by balancing
a cairn as in the following picture? It turns out that these embrasures
are on or near the same ridge that the park acknowledges is part of a Native
American summer solstice sunset ceremony. Independently of their origin,
these structures are a unique location in the park.
From the top of one ridge
down into a gully there is a sequence of embrasures. Some overlook the
gully at the top, some seem to define "stations" between the top and the
bottom. Note the little cairn of rocks against the skyline in the
first.
Notice how the second
picture shows an un-enclosed space defined by three propped-up plates of
rock, seats perhaps.
In the third picture, notice
how the stonework blends so naturally in with the bedrock ridge.
One embrasure,shown
here from the exit, from the middle and from the entrance, seems entirely
defined by a large shaped rock at its center. One notices the entrance
and that, walking into it, one is led around the central rock. I imagine
making an offering on the way past.
If you find
this embrasure, notice the strategic placement of small bits of quartz
or light feldspar, shining against the gray schist background. One light
fragment locates the entrance (in the foreground of the third picture),
one is at the center stone built into the embrasure. Another is a fedlspar
cobble lying loose in the dead leaves (lower left of second picture).
Take time to
look at the shape of the central rock.
I have never found, but have been told about many other features at
Great Brook Farm which suggest the sacred. Aside from the stone turtle,
Great Brook Farm also has stone seats, indian corn grinding bowls and perhaps
underground chambers. You might discover these yourself. Walk here, or
in almost any woodland in New England, and with a little sensitivity and
curiosity you will find locations that suggest a sacred use of the landscape
in the past, and sometimes also in the present..
To find out more about sacred sites in New England, visit www.neara.org,
or read Manitou - The Sacred Landscape of New England's Native Civilization,
by James Mavor and Byron Dix. The sites shown were found by exploring a
very small fraction of the woods within a radius of perhaps 10 miles, so
there must be a great deal more waiting to be found.