US-4702 F. Gilbert Hills SF

I've hiked Gilbert Hills for many years, long before I became active with POTA. One reason is that it's close to my QTH, and Gilbert Hills and nearby US-8383 Wrentham State Forest (it's right across the street from Gilbert Hills) are my 'home' parks for all sorts of POTA experiments and casual activations. Another is the unique concentration of archaic stone structures scattered throughout the forest, and that's another hobby of mine.

There are traces of the people who have lived in this area stretching back tens of thousands of years. Not too far away on the Blackstone River near Lincoln, Rhode Island, is a significant Paleolithic site dating to around 11,000 years before present time where over 1,000 pieces of stone tools and debitage have been documented, and a bit to the east an even earlier site in Canton, Massachusetts has been excavated. The Canton site was mainly a hunting camp and lacked materials for tools and weapons – items found have been traced to quarries and outcroppings across New England.

To my eye the Gilbert Hills area holds evidence of later populations, groups that we would identify as 'indigenous people'. The Woodland period broadly stretched from roughly 1,000 BC to 1000 AD, with a prior period, the Archaic, emerging from the mesolithic and neolithic cultures that populated the river valleys and coasts. It's the later Woodland culture that likely placed most of the large stone artifacts visible in the park today.

There are three main sections of the park that offer decreasing levels of amenities, so you can pull up in your car, pop up an antenna, and operate right from the parking lot on the south side – take Mill Street off of West Street to get to this location. It's about a mile and a half off of the Gilbert Hills signage on Route 1. This is the main entrance, and you'll find plenty of parking, picnic tables, a Forest Service office, trailheads, and quite a few people in good weather. The trails from here are relatively flat, and there are a few short loops to take if you are just looking for a half hour's walk.

On the opposite side of the park you'll find a turnoff for High Rock Road off of Route 1, about half a mile east of the park's main sign. This narrow road will take you past the Southeastern Massachusetts Regional Emergency Communications Center (ECC), a facility opened in 2020 to service 911 calls from several neighboring towns. It and its impressive non-ham tower will be on your right as you come up the hill – just past it is a parking area for a dozen cars, and you also can park along the side of the road near the ECC. From here trailheads will bring you into the woods near the peak of the hill.

The third area to park is on the west side, around a half mile from the Route 1 turn. Look for a tree stump and a fire hydrant, it isn't a very big lot and is easy to miss, especially because it is unmarked. There are spots for only five or six cars here, but the lot gives you access to what I'd call the 'lower' part of the park to the north and east of the ECC.

Any of these areas provide plenty of places to operate from. The forest is relatively dense but I've used wires up to 66 feet in length, along with hamsticks and verticals with not too much trouble. The overall topography is a series of ridges and outcroppings closely spaced, so it isn't too difficult to get up high, though the peak sits only at 420 feet. The major trails are marked, however the more interesting trails have been cut by ORV riders and bikers and tend not to be identified. Most will show up on maps that use OpenStreetMaps as their source.

So what's out here that's so interesting? For the most part we're seeing large stone artifacts, either marked or arranged in some special way or obviously altered from their natural state to serve some human interest.

One problem that we immediately face is that there are a lot of natural geological processes that can result in something that looks artificial. For example, is the star-shaped feature shown here next to a small water spring natural, or was it cut to mark the spot? It could be either, I think. Maybe there was a natural groove that was extended and elaborated on. It could be a natural crack in the rock, too.

A few large structures in the park don't appear to be all that old but are built in the same style as earlier examples might have been. The Prayer Seat below is a feature that I believe to be relatively young, probably built in the 1900s. It isn't lined up on anything obvious, and you can look at the undersides of stones to see that they have similar weathering patterns as the tops, an indication that the stones were placed recently.

However, the park is littered with prayer seats, and once you know what to look for it's nearly impossible not to see them. In this area they tend to be low and rectangular with three sides, the opening invariably pointing either due east or due west, the rising and setting point of the sun at the equinoxes. Often you'll find an actual seat of stone to sit on.

Some features are a little more obviously human-made, but even here we need to be cautious. Yes, there's evidence that people have lived in this area stretching back 10,000 years, but there also was a significant influx of colonists and their industry stretching back for the past few hundred. A quarter of a mile from the star-marked spring is a rock quarry that operated in the mid-1800s, and sometimes it's tough to determine whether a cut on a rock was made with a modern tool or a primitive one.

An entire class of artifact is the Perched Stone, and you'll find dozens in the park. A typical example is shown in the image above. One school of thought holds that these are religious in nature and represent the power of a shaman, and to be fair there are examples (though not in this park as far as I know) of perched stones bearing markings.

I see these as a natural phenomenon, a result of the melting of the glacier that covered this part of the country up to a few miles deep. As those glaciers grew and advanced southward, they picked up enormous chunks of rock, often slicing off the entire top of hills. When the ice melted, many of the large boulders descended more or less vertically onto a rocky substrate. Put a pebble on top of an ice cube and let the cube melt – you can see that the pebble is deposited more or less below where it was perched on the ice.

In many cases these boulders came to rest on smaller rocks and fragments. The melting ice generated large, sweeping floods as the lakes of icewater broke through their natural dams. One of the best examples of this is US-8423 Purgatory Chasm where such an event occurred around 10,000 BC and dug the gouge in the earth we visit today, flinging house-sized boulders into the air and fracturing granite faces. That moving water would carry smaller rocks and debris out and away from underneath the large boulders that had come to rest, leaving the ones held firmly by the boulder above, resulting in what we see today as a perched stone.

And what about this one?

This set of features is just off the Megley path on the 'high' side of the trail to the north. Not a few researchers look at the stone in the foreground and conclude that it has been modified to form the effigy of a bird. The argument is bolstered by the large pile of stone behind it – piles like this are legitimately associated with early peoples and appear to have been used as tributes, similar to the way many cultures place pebbles or coins on gravestones as a mark of rememberance. I've walked all around that stone, and I've put my hands on its features many times, and I still can't tell you if it is natural or not.

However, some artifacts are obviously placed, and we can deduce some of their function. If you've parked near the ECC at the top of the hill, or on the west side in the small lot, the Megley Trail is a large, well-marked path that leads to an area marked on maps as The Dolmen. This is a large, flat rock, about an 8-foot by 4-foot rectangular slab, that is set on three smaller rocks to form a low table. Quite a bit of speculation surrounds this object, and I personally have spent a lot of time in this area observing and measuring and thinking.

It's a dolmen because it fits the classic definition of a flat, elevated stone. It was quite obviously placed, and I believe that I've identified the ledge nearby, overhanging the spring mentioned earlier, that it was cut from. Many believe that a groove on the stone was used as a drain for blood during sacrifices. Personally I still haven't decided, after years of looking at it, whether the groove is natural or not. Even if it is natural, I've always thought that the dolmen would make an ideal table to butcher game, as it's the right size, near water, and apparently part of a larger complex.

Even more obviously placed are three large boulders that have been arranged in a north-south line a few steps away from the dolmen.

The boulders overlook the spring below them, and each is big, roughly four feet in diameter. They are placed roughly 25 feet from each other in a straight north-south line.

By themselves these would be pretty interesting. The Axis of the World, around which the planet rotates, is imagined as a line or pole running north and south, and it is a common feature of belief systems from around the world and across time. Any time I run across a set of three or more stones that look like they've been placed, I pull out a compass to check the alignment.

These particular stones do not function alone, though. There are at least two standing stones within a quarter of a mile that can be used to sight across these boulders, and the lines they form mark important periodic celestial events, for example the solar solstices and equinoxes. A third nearby stone doesn't have an obvious alignment, but it points in the direction of the boulders, so it might have been a part of a different measurement. It's important to note that the forest here is young, so it's quite likely that archaic inhabitants would have had clear sight lines that we lack now.

The arrangement can also be used to mark the dates of maximum and minimum lunar excursions, measuring the periodic path of the moon month to month and season to season. All of these events were important, and the activity of the community would have been guided by them.

I've been hiking Gilbert Hills for years, long before I came to POTA. When I activate the park now I really feel the weight of history on me. One new advantage POTA brings is that I'm sitting in one spot for an hour or so with nothing much to do except observe, and at Gilbert Hills what I like to do is to find an area that interests me from an archaeological or geological standpoint and set up there, knowing that I'll be spending time absorbing new information.

POTA has also greatly expanded the scope of interesting sites for me from just a few nearby to hundreds across New England. It's one of the great powers of POTA, getting people out into natural areas that they might not have even thought of before, and every time I'm in a new park I see something I haven't noticed before.