Sacred Landscapes
Let us take a tour with pictures and descriptions of some of the places in the woods of Concord and vicinity. The woods are full of stone architecture: stone walls, old house foundations, mill-races, quarries, water drainage systems, and structures whose purpose is not hard to guess. But the woods are also full of curious stone structures whose purpose is not clear. These include short semicircular embrasures, standing stones, isolated short courses of stone wall, stone circles, stone piles, petroglyphs, animal figures, and such a variety of material as to suggest many people over time using the landscape in many different ways. I try to show some of this. There is often a hint that a structure was created for reasons that go beyond the material and the practical, so this tour will not be just a description; it will also be a search for hints of the sacred in the past and also in the present.

We visit:

Never having located them, we do not visit: These sites are fragile, and in some cases are still in use; so I have not given exact directions to the them, only clues.

To see more detail in any of the pictures below, use a right mouse button click and select "View Image".