[I originally wrote this in November 2011, but never posted this series on the local geology. The pictures are still worth seeing.]
As I got nearer home, a line of bare dirt caught my eye. It appeared to be a berm outlining a square filled with piles of gravel.
The imagination can come up with explanations besides a geometrically obsessed gopher.
It looked a bit like an archaeological site that had had a layer removed and sifted. However, I doubt any archaeologist would do the sifting within the confines of an excavation.
Another possibility was that it had once been a much taller pile of gravel, perhaps like the cone, and someone had sieved it to take away the finer stones for a road or drive. They may have built the berm to keep the rock from sliding away. However, I can’t imagine why they would have bothered to create a square, rather than an encircling ring.
It remains one of those inexplicable marks humans leave on the land that the weather hasn’t yet erased.
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