The previous post was an overview the Fulacht Fiadh associated with the Drombeg Stone Ring of County Cork, Republic of Ireland.
In this post, we explore the elements of these fascinating remnants from the late Bronze Age, over 3,000 years ago.
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rock- lined pit
It is amazing the rock wall survived human need for the valuable wall stones. Portions were stolen, though for the most part we can see enough to understand.
rock- lined pit and hearthView of entrance to the south from above the spring, visible is the rock lines cooking pit filled with ground water.
Notice the groupings of visitors in the middle distance of Pam’s photograph, gathered around remains of late Bronze age elements.
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There is a sign to explain…
Trach atá sa bhfulacht fiadh le brutháil teallach agus tobair lena ais agus atá dúnta ag falla cloiche íseal le hiontráil soir. Líonadh an traid trí clocha te a théamh ar theallach agus a n-aistriú isteach sa traid lán le huisce fuar. Léiríodh le turgnamh a rinneadh le linn na tochailte ar an áit i 1957 gur féidir 70 galún (318 lítear) d’uisce fuar a thabhairt chun boil in 18 nóiméad. Ansin bhíodh feoil ann is a cócaireacht. Maireann an t-uisce seo te ar feadh 3 n-uaire an chloig. Cuirtear úsáidí eile sa bhfulacht fia ar aghaidh, mar shampla folcadáin, ceardaíocht amhail ruaimniú agus grúdaireacht.
In modern Ireland the word fulacht means barbeque and the archeological sites with characteristics in common, such as a water source, health and pit, are named “Fulacht fiadh,” derived from Old Irish sources. In all cases the link is to some kind of preparation activity involving heat and moisture. Found throughout Ireland, Great Britan and the Isle of Man where the sites are called burnt mounds. The Drombeg Fulacht fiadh exemplifies all characterists. There is a horseshoe shaped rock walled/banked, now a remnant, enclosure, entrance to the south. In the middle is a pit, at Drombeg lined with rock, a spring on one side, a hearth on the other. A stone saddle quern, used for grinding grain, was nearby Adjacent huts, rock walls with post holes, do not suggest a settlement, but rather a temporary use.
View of entrance to the south from above the spring, visible is the rock lines cooking pit filled with ground water.
In my last Pinelands post, “cedar water” was featured. This post is a exploration of the “cedar” in “cedar water.”
White Cedar, also known as Swamp Cedar, is a water loving tree seen here to the right of Quaker Brider, Wharton State Forest.
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“Cedar water” is the dark, tea like, flow of Pinelands rivers colored by vegetable tannins.
White Cedar thrives along Pinelands waterways, lending color to the “cedar water.” 18th Century sea captains favored cedar water for long voyages, famours for staying fresh far longer than other waters. Also known as arborvite, “tree of life”, for the medicinal properties of the bark, well known throughout Native America.
Known for flat sprays of scaley leaves
The Pinelands are under siege from attacks much worse than this defacement
Libe Slope is between the West Campus and Quadrangle / Libraries.
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Cornell University is on a west-facing hill above Cayuga lake.
Besides the exercise of walking the 18 degree incline several times each day, Cornell students and alumni remember The Slope for autumn color.
Wonderful Flow of Limbs among Gold
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Hickory
Seen from the north on a cloudy October day, this Pignut Hickory (Carya glabra) is the largest tree on the Cornell Campus, at 79 inches in diameter.
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Cornell University is on a west-facing hill above Cayuga lake.
Take another look at the previous image. Can you find the grey squirrel? This hickory grows south of the Johnson Museum and among the autumn glories, it is the largest and brightest yellow canopy on Libe Slope.
Contrast
An overcast day is the best to capture this spectacle. October 20, 2012 provided both bright sun and dark, rolling autumn clouds. I waited on the north side, sheltered from the glare of the sky, for these perfect moments.
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I remember this hickory for the contrast between the canopy and trunk, the way the clumps of yellow hang from dark boughs.
The pignut hickory is native to these Eastern United States. It is known to favor moist slopes and this specimen has thrived on The Slope. The ground beneath it is thick with nuts.
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One week later
Just one week later, late afternoon on a sunny Friday as hurricane Sandy approached the east coast the hickory has fewer, tawny golden leaves.
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
After work on a 2008 Friday afternoon in October we sped over to Beebee Lake on the Cornell University Campus to catch the late afternoon glow.
Beebe Lake is formed by a dam on Fall Creek. It seems to be the flooded meadow it is, surrounded by hills formed by glaciers 10,000 years ago. Cornell maintains footpaths around the lake.
People say that if a couple walk the a mile around the lake and over a bridge at either end, they are destined to be married. This day we passed only joggers and families. Pam and I will celebrated our tenth anniversary March 2019, so the legend worked for us.
Here are four snapshots from that time, presented in chronological order. Each is a handheld shot taken on the fly using my Sony Alpha 700 I use for exploratory photography.
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A terraced stair descends to the east side meadow to south lake shore path
I walked down a path trod by Canadian geese to reach a clear view of the water.
View of Helen Newman Hall
Lily pads and iris fronds grow along the bank.
Evening sunlight reflected from smooth water crests driven by a steady light wind
Being on the west side of the lake, the dam is bathed in golden autumn light.
The Dam That Forms Beebee Lake
On top the hill, not visible behind the trees, above the opposite bank is Fuertes Observatory. We visited it this night, opened to the public as it is on all clear Friday nights while classes are running.
Copyright 2021 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
Pam posing with wind blown hair on the rock outcrop I used to achieve site overviews. In medium distance, other visitors gather around another site feature.
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From 2004 through 2011 I visited Arizona every Autumn, October or November. As a University of Arizona Alumni Board member for the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences we had a meeting during “homecoming” and a fund raising event. I’d come early or stay later for getting acquainted with Arizona, more than was possible as an undergraduate. In 2007 I camped for several days Chiricahua National Monument of the remote south eastern corner of the state.
The park empties out this time of year, for some reason. The weather is perfection with clear skies, moderate daytime temperatures, cool nights. This time of year the Arizona White Oak acorns ripen and fall. The campground has aluminum picnic tables, the falling acorns made a loud plunks throughout the night. This would annoy some people. Me, it is a great memory.
The following two images are great memories from my first morning.
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These formations hovered over the trail on my first morning. The rising full moon was an unplanned bonus.
I experimented this trip with a breakfast of granola with dried whole milk. It was delicious (for me) and got me out on the trail quickly. This first morning I clicked my hiking poles together to scare away bears as I walked in the pre-dawn dark. The preparation and extra effort paid off with this photograph.
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I met one hiker who was a harbor pilot from Hamburg, Germany. He came just to view a particular rock formation that was, literally, the rubber bath duck. It is several miles to the site, a moderate hike with significant elevation gain. He took his snapshot with a little camera and was on his way.
The following is my masterpiece from the trip. Imaging the effect of seeing this image on settlers. That same first day I turned a corner and there this was…it took a few minutes to comprehend what I saw, it was so incredible and, for me, unexpected. It first, the only perception is a huge rock dome of rough rock, then, slowly, the image of a native American profile forms in the mind. Cochise Dawn
During the session for Cochise Dawn I turned the camera for the view northwest and did a self portrait. In the distance are the Galiuro Mountains and Wilderness. Tucked alongside is the Aravaipa Canyon Wilderness, hosting one of the few perennial streams of Arizona.
Copyright 2017 Michael Stephen Wills All Rights Reserved
In my post Canyon of Music, Wind, Light I shared a different photograph of this beetle crawling on sandstone, naming it as a “dung beetle”. I had assumed it was one from once having seen a beetle in an Arizona desert pushing a ball of dung around. This morning, to confirm my assumption, I searched for images of “Arizona Dung Beetle” and was dismayed to find this beetle shares no characteristics with the photographs. Absent smoking gun evidence, sadly lacking in this photograph, I have to admit my “dung beetle” attribution is in error.
Supporting the beetle, the luminous surface of the red sandstone named “de Chelly,” sunlight reflects from durable remnants of the ancestral Rocky Mountains wore to these bits of rock, piled to mountainous dunes by the winds of tens of thousands years, polished to smoothness each against the others.
Mysterious abrasion and grooves in a de Chelly sandstone cliff, Canyon de Chelly.
The above photograph is a detail from the brightly lit cliff of the following photograph. The desert varnish and underlying rock was weathered over thousands of years, the sand grains falling to the canyon floor.
The soil of the canyon is composed of these bits of the ancestral Rocky Mountains. What appears to be a white road in the above photograph is not man-made, it is the dried bed of a stream. When a waterway is dry like this, only flowing with rains, it is called a wash. When water fills the wash of the Canyon Del Muerto, the polished sand granules become a dangerous morass, sucking down horses, people, anything unlucky enough to step into it. Every movement, struggling for freedom, pulls the victim deeper down until the wet sand closes over the head and suffocation and death ensues.
Stairs cut into the sandstone cliff of Canyon de Chelly
The waters Canyon De Chelly National Monument naturally form a vast Y into the Defiance Plateau, naturally because two major streams merge into one canyon a few miles above Chinle. On both our guided trips, heading east from Chinle there is a branch. On the right De Chelly canyon continues. On the left is Canyon Del Muerto. The photos in this post are all from “The Canyon of the Dead”, what the name means translated into English.
No, it is not named this because of the quicksand. Conditions for quicksand are present throughout canyons of the southwest. It is history of human occupation for which this canyon was named. I will cover it in a future posting. For now, I will say the above views are from the spot featured in “Family Trek.”
My first visit, in 2003, while my son Sean climbed the rocks with our guide, I was left to document the wondrous surroundings. The above shallow cave is reached by that stairway carved into the precipitous ledge. The access to the cave is via those naturally occurring ridges of the cross bedded sandstone. It is another example of De Chelly sandstone formed from the windblown edge of a monstrous ancient sand dune.
A solid block of De Chelly sandstone formed from the central bulk of a sand dune.
Here is another example of rock formed from the solid body of the sand dune, that unbroken and un-striated cliff. Below is the cross-bedded, windblown sand.
Autumn lights up the floor of Canyon De Chelly, the foliage rivals the cliffs for wonder at this time.
As we proceeded generally east from the climbing spot of “Family Trek”, driving by the golden cottonwood foliage I asked the guide to stop for these photographs.
Canyon walls
Soon the cliffs hid the sun.
Notice the modern water distribution system (pipe) at the foot of cliff on right. These vast tracks of shadow adjacent to bright sunlight are a fact of life for canyon dwellers, a source of joy and wonder.
The canyon here is rather like the Narrows of Zion, without the water.
These photographs were taken the last days of August 2021, the 26th and 27th, while exploring Burlington County, New Jersey, with my sister. I will be writing about our Thursday and Friday for awhile, starting with today’s installment.
Quaker Bridge Road traverses the wilderness of Wharton State Forest with a beginning off Route 206, Atsion Mansion. Our planning included Jeep Wrangler rental, only high-clearance 4-wheel vehicles are appropriate, the road surface is humpy sand, water filled holes abound. Still, sitting there at the start, with Atsion Mansion house in view, I waited awhile until a high clearance tour bus packed with adventurers, kayaks passed into the pines and out of sight. We proceeded an uneventful ~4 miles to Quaker Bridge at a stately 5 miles per hour, invoking four-wheel drive low gear a mile or so in.
Here is Quaker Bridge over Mullica River today, facing East.
Mullica River from Quaker Bridge facing downstream
Quaker Bridge road was a well traveled main route through the Pines for almost a hundred years with an inconvenient crossing of The Mullica at this point. During the year 1774, some sa 1772, West Jersey Quakers travelling to the Little Egg Harbor Yearly Meeting, started “a day early”, built a bridge. From a c.1940 photograph it is clear in that “day” they felled large trees for pilings, smaller trees, pines and cedars, for the other bridge elements. Since then, the crossing has been called “Quaker Bridge.”
Over time, the east side became a resting place, with at least one Inn/Tavern. Here is the east side today.
Even without hospitality and bustling humanity, after 4 miles of dreary road from Atsion this spot carries a sense of lightness, the well spaced straight pines over several acres conveying peace and rest. Over 35 miles from the ocean, the white sand presents as beach. There is a reason for this feeling, a 15 million year reason.
Visual presentation of Pinelands geologic origins, from New Jersey Geologic Survey, Scott Stanford author, 2005.
Between 15 and 10 million years ago the earth climate turned colder, so much water evaporated from the oceans to fall as snow and ice in the polar regions ocean levels fell 150 to 250 feet. As the ocean fell away, over eaons, mountains to the west were ground down, pulverized by the elements to flow, gather on the exposed plain. The white “beach” sand we see today, at Quaker Bridge and other Pinelands places, are surfaces of this “Cohansey” sands and clay ranging in thickness from 25 feet in the west to more than 300 feet at the Atlantic Ocean.
Over millions of years the land raised to become the drainage patterns we see today. The renewable resources of “bog iron” and water spring from this history.
Visual presentation of Pinelands geologic origins, from New Jersey Geologic Survey, Scott Stanford author, 2005.
Standing there I imagined Great Great Grandmother Ann (Milley) McCambridge resting on the journey from the McCambridge home near Speedwell. I placed the pebble, collected from Long Island Sound, on Grandmother Ann’s headstone the evening of August 26th. Click this link for more about Ann McCambridge.
Sacred to the Memory of ANN wife of James McCambridge who departed this life December 27th 1855 in the 51st year of her age.
Reference
I found Quaker Bridge background in “Heart of the Pines, ghostly voices of the Pine Barrens” by John E. Pearce, pp 748 – 750, Batsto Citizens Committee, 4110 Nesco Road, Hammonton, N.J. 08037-3814.
Michael Stephen Wills Photography 