WALK INTO A PATCH OF forest in New England, and chances are you will—almost literally—stumble across a stone wall.... estimates [are] that there are more than 100,000 miles of old, disused stone walls out there, or enough to circle the globe four times.Who would build a stone wall, let alone hundreds of thousands of miles of them, in the middle of the forest? No one.
Rather, they were built around farms that have fallen back into forest.
The supply of stone seemed endless. A field would be cleared in the autumn, and there would be a whole new crop of stones in the spring. This is due to a process known as “frost heave.” As deforested soils freeze and thaw, stones shift and migrate to the surface. “People in the Northeast thought that the devil had put them there,” says Susan Allport, author of the book Sermons in Stone: The Stone Walls of New England and New York. “They just kept coming.”
This is also true here. There are a lot of rock walls on the mountain, where once there were cattle pastures. Now there is forest again, with a few groves of old apple trees marking where once someone's home stood.
Though the population continues to climb, we are over a demographic cliff in much of the world as birth rates drop below replacement levels. China, for example, is likely to have fewer people than the United States by the end of the century. It will be interesting, for those who come after, to wander in the renewed wilderness where once were farms -- neighborhoods -- cities.
6 comments:
In parts of Connecticut, in the woods, there are deep road cuts with stone walls on either side, so ones eyes are on level with the base of the walls. Only on climbing out of the cut does one realize the surrounding terrain, now forest, once fields, are the original level and the dirt wagon path has eroded into the land. In such places old relics may be found, handblown glassware,old bits of iron , once I found a stream cascading down through an old settlement with 5 or 6 separate stone dams staggered down the course, where the waterpower had been put to use for various endeavors.
Back in the 50's and 60', New England was still quite rural, before the highway system enabled suburbs to grow- old barns were filled with the cast off items of yore, my buddy found a old muzzleloader hanging from the beams in one. These barns (and houses) were built with cut granite slabs for foundations, and chestnut timbers with locust pegs. White pine was cut for siding, back when the Eastern white pine was prized for masts, and woe to the fool who cut one with the Kings broad arrow mark on it, reserving Royal Ownership for his Majesties ships of war.
The forests of the eastern US are a diverse delight, with a wonderful mix of hardwoods and softwoods, till one reaches the northern areas of Vermont, New Hampshire and Maine, and it turns into a near mono culture of spruce, the monotonous sea of thirty or forty foot evergreens supporting little life, as Rogers Rangers found to their bellies lament on their journey north.
You only need stone walls halfway up the legs for cows, but if sheep can see over a fence they will move heaven and earth to get to the other side. So they needed to get those walls up to five feet high, especially in the early 1800s when the really good sheep started getting smuggled out of Spain. There was little forest on any land that was reachable by 1850. But it all slowly went back to dairy and hay, and eventually trees came back - beeches and birches first, then the white pines. Hardwoods later.
You can read the history of what used to be in a place if you learn a few tricks and take care. Reading the Forest Landscape is the name of the best book.
As deforested soils freeze and thaw, stones shift and migrate to the surface.
Just to be pedantic for its own sake, the process is more a matter of smaller particles falling into and through the interstices between the larger particles, driving the larger to the surface.
Eric Hines
Thank you, AVI, for the book recommendation.
Maggies had links to a couple of videos on the topic
The story of Northeastern forests
Woodland forensics
From the Amazon page for AVI's book recommendation, the author has a newer field guide out specifically to teach people how to read a forest:
Forest Forensics: A Field Guide to Reading the Forested Landscape
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