Dirty Old Belmont Water Tower

Seeing the last gasps of warm weather in New England on the horizon, I decided to get out on my bike for one last monster ride. I brought along my camera thinking that I'd take some colorful photos of pretty leaves and other typical Boston area seasonal landscape crap. After a couple hours on side roads and looping trails in Belmont, I still hand't taken the camera out of my pocket. Being a long time New England boy - I guess I'm all set with big yellow trees.

Oh wait - I did take one nature shot...

 
But then I started finding some subject matter more suitable to my tastes. This was on the side of an abandoned barn.

Yeah, yeah...I know it's not a Banksy. But I'm a sucker for all forms of graffiti and street art - be it in the woods or the ghetto. After climbing some hills I noticed an old water tower that was marked up...

Now that's what I call a successful bike ride. But there was still one more surprise - a form of artistic expression that pre-dates spray-paint (and all paint). I've seen all kinds of crazy man-made rock structures buried in the woods, lost to time - rock walls, rock circles, standing stones, cairns, effigies - but this stone circle in the shape of a labyrinth was completely unexpected...

You can see some of the labyrinth pattern from this angle...

A lot of antiquities similar to this have been associated with Native Americans, but my gut tells me this was probably laid down when Belmont was all farmland, prior to the train tracks that were built nearby in 1840. It's about 30 feet in diameter and the headstone points East.

But maybe it is much older, it's really hard to tell with something like this. The New England landscape has changed dramatically over the last 500 years, but with over 100,000 Native Americans living on these lands in 1500 it would be pretty naive to think that they didn't leave their mark here in Dirty Old Belmont - and elsewhere throughout New England.