Hartford Courant, January 10, 2010
We seem to have an inscrutable affection for stones, despite their cold and lifeless nature. Call it the “Stonehenge syndrome,” but standing stones, cairns, and stacked rocks in the Japanese garden style are common in farmyards, on urban and suburban lawns, and near office buildings, apartments and shopping centers.
New England is renowned for both stony soils and stone walls threading through our forests and fields. For generations, we’ve embraced this geologic abundance by standing long stones on end or building mounds to set property lines, mark trails, establish fence and hitching posts, and emblazon gateways. But increasingly, property owners are using stones for less functional reasons. More than ever, it seems that rocks either crudely shaped with tools or naturally formed are being used to make aesthetic, political or spiritual statements.
There’s a tall, rough-cut, gray standing stone at the entrance to the relatively new Wishing Well Apartments on busy Route 7 in New Milford. On a steep, sleepy street in Collinsville, one of my neighbors has a massive stone about seven feet tall looming beside their driveway. Another stone shaft can be found on the front lawn of a house on Hartford’s Warrenton Avenue.
While many standing stones have been quarried, others are creations of nature that have been placed upright with human effort. Behind a law office on Route 202 in Litchfield is a peace garden containing several huge standing stones whose uneven shapes were sculpted by glaciers and the freezing and thawing of uncounted winters. Their hulking presence helps inspire the quiet that is cherished in such a place.
Sometimes, stones once carefully shaped for another purpose have been recycled as standing stones. A huge millstone sits in front of an old barn converted to commercial use on Bantam Road in Litchfield. Long retired from the grinding for which it was first made, it still serves the business purpose of attracting trade. Old well curbs—large, thin, flat stones with a big hole in the middle—are sometimes placed on their edge when the well they once served is discontinued. There’s one in front of an apartment building in the Reynolds Bridge section of Thomaston that always draws my eye, not just because of its stark, simple beauty, but because it seems strange to have something that was designed to lie horizontally now perched on its edge.
It’s not unusual these days to find stone cairns or stacks piled in the Japanese garden manner set among flowers, grasses or herbs in well-tended plots; but when many of them are collected together on ordinary ground, the effect is arresting. There’s a parcel used by a commercial compost business in the Northfield section of Litchfield that has tens of standing and stacked stones cleverly placed among trees, in swales and fields, and along the road. It’s a fairyland of stones, something one might imagine from out of The Hobbit.
From England’s Salisbury Plain to Groton, Connecticut’s Gungywamp, standing stones have been placed throughout the world since the dawn of human history. Cairns were erected millennia ago by Native Americans and mark mountain summits around the globe including Connecticut’s highest peak, Bear Mountain. The Buddhist-influenced “balance and tension” formed by carefully stacking stones goes back centuries. But even the future may have its high-tech monoliths if the black slabs of Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 science fiction film, 2001: A Space Odyssey is any indication.
The reasons that ancient peoples erected stone monuments are yet to be fully explained, and modern speculations continue to evolve. They’ve been considered religious and funerary sites, astronomical observatories, giant calendars, and battle monuments.
Contemporary stone placements may be only slightly less mysterious because we don’t fully fathom our own motivations beyond a satisfying aesthetic. Perhaps the stones provide a sense of spiritual timelessness and endurance, nostalgia for agrarian or industrial days when stonework was endemic, or a prefiguring of the monument at our own final resting place. Regardless, today’s stones share some of the physical and psychic attributes of those established in the distant past, imparting an additional fascination to the places where we live.
