Introduction
In
September 1938,
a monstrous and devastating hurricane swept through New
England, flattening houses and uprooting trees as far
north as central New Hampshire. It was probably the
equivalent 
of the severe
category five hurricane.
Shortly
after the hurricane moved through Montville, Connecticut – a
small town about eight miles north of New London – two
teenagers, Mary Crouch and Carl Pilecki, were walking along the steep
and lonely north slope of Beaver Dam Hill, not far from their homes,
when they came upon a scene that undoubtedly startled them. Many trees had been
uprooted by the storm, but one in particular caught their eye. A large oak tree had
fallen, and in the process tore open a stone lined hole, four feet long
by two feet wide and three feet deep (Fig. 1).
We are not sure just what Mary and Carl did once
they peered into the hole – which was partly filled with dirt
from the uprooted tree – but perhaps they looked around and
discovered that this was only a portion of a long tunnel-like
structure, whose opening was some ten feet down slope and to the north. From this first discovery
to the mid-1980s, we hear nothing about the structure.
Presumably the two teens kept knowledge of this
feature pretty much to themselves for the next forty-six years.
On
October 28, 1984, the Norwich Sunday Bulletin
carried an article by Sheri Venema titled “Chambers Shrouded
in Secrets,” which told the story of two underground stone
chambers that Charles Chase, a local resident, had found deep in the
woods of Oakdale, just east of Montville.
This site would later be referred to as the
‘Montville Complex.’ Mary
Crouch read the article and recalled the strange passageway she and
Carl had discovered as teenagers long ago.
She telephoned Chase early in November and told him
about the collapsed tunnel she had seen in 1938, thinking that he might
be interested in seeing it, which of course he was.
Mary was unclear as to precisely where she had seen
it, but with the help of her old friend Carl, she was able to guide
Chase to it.
Chase
quickly realized the importance and uniqueness of the discovery. He contacted David Barron,
president of the Gungywamp Society of Noank,
Connecticut,
who was one of the first to visit it that month.
Barron, in turn, notified Jim Whittall, president of
the Early Sites Research Society in Massachusetts,
and together with Malcolm Pearson, a photographer, they visited the
tunnel on December 2nd of that year.
Whittall
had traveled extensively in Europe
and was familiar with Bronze and Iron Age underground chambers, as was
Barron. He
concurred with Barron that the tunnel-like structure was similar to the
fougos
or souterrains
both of them had seen in Ireland,
Great Britain
and Normandy. It was the similarity of
the Montville
tunnel to the European souterrains that gave the Montville
example its appellation.
Whittall
described this first visit in the December 1984 issue of the Early Sites Research Society Bulletin:
“To
enter the passage, one must crawl through an opening 22” by
22” for a distance of 8 feet to a point where one can
continue on hands and knees for another 20 feet.
In a crouched position, the final distance can be
covered to a little corbelled chamber at the end; a total distance of
37.5 feet from the entrance. The
walls of the passageway are straight-sided, dressed drywall stonework,
never exceeding 2 feet in width…The end wall of the chamber
is cut into a ledge which has been roughly quarried to shape and level
its contour. The
souterrain is an architectural feat of determination on the part of the
builders” (Whittall 1984: 7).
Pearson
took photos of this visit, some of which were used to accompany
Whittall’s article (Fig. 2).
At the same time, Barron had written a short article
on the find for a 1984 issue of Stonewatch,
the publication of the Gungywamp Society.
All of this occurred at a time when the ideas of
Barry Fell, a Harvard marine biologist turned antiquarian and
epigrapher, were strongly held by a band of enthusiasts. Fell had written the
popular book America B.C. in 1976,
in which he concluded that Irish Celtic monks had visited North America
in the early centuries of the Christian era and had constructed stone
chambers. The
souterrain fit nicely into the picture he drew of Celtic influences in
the New World, and to cement this
connection, Barron found three vertical incisions on the large anchor
stone to the right of the entrance, which Fell concluded were Celtic ogam.
These are perpendicular to the natural grain of the
stone, and have been interpreted by two geologists as being man-made
(Fig. 3). Fell
concluded the lines signified the consonants L and B, and he combined
these into the words ‘Lord Bel.”
Much
of what he wrote about ogam has been questioned, particularly his
article that interpreted groove marks on a West
Virginia cave wall as a Christian
message (Fell 1983). This
led to a sharply analyzed response by Oppenheimer & Wirtz
(1989), and by Professor Brendan O’Herir, late professor of
English at Berkeley and a Celtic scholar, who dissected
Fell’s interpretation of incisions on a cave in West Virginia
(1983), in a lengthy unpublished manuscript of 1990 titled
“Barry Fell’s West Virginia Fraud.”
Montville
‘Souterrain’
Is
the Montville
souterrain really a souterrain? This
structure has been largely ignored by academic archaeologists, perhaps
because it was discovered by a group of neo-antiquarians who seemed to
have an agenda of lumping together the area’s stone chambers
and this unusual tunnel into a Celtic grab bag.
Such an association and the people who promoted it
were anathema to the archaeologists and were better left alone. Let us have a
closer look.
The
souterrain is found about 300 feet from a country road on the north
side of a steep, rocky slope covered with tangled laurel and other
underbrush This
slope is often in shadow, because the ridge above blocks much of the
sunlight. The
combination of the rocky terrain, dense brush, and subdued
light makes
the area feel uninviting and slightly creepy.
With
no distinct landmarks in the vicinity, the
‘souterrain’ is difficult to find, and one is often
reduced to going back and forth across the hillside, climbing over
boulders and through tangles of laurel and vines, trying to find the
entrance, until with a good deal of luck one finally reaches a rotting
downed oak, over which the entrance comes into view (Fig. 4). David Barron once
described a large flat stone in front of the entrance that he felt
might have blocked it. There
is a notched stone just in front of the entrance that seems to fit the
bill, but I am unsure if this is the one he referred to. It is a little more than
three feet away and seems to be the right size, measuring 17”
high by 33” wide. One
side of this stone is rough, and it probably faced out.
With the stone covering the entrance, the chamber
would have been nearly invisible, and this may be one reason why the
souterrain hasn’t suffered more damage over time.
The
souterrain was constructed by first digging a narrow channel nearly
thirty-eight feet long and more than five feet deep into the ground to
a rocky ledge, lining the sides with parallel courses of flat surfaced
gneiss, a local stone,
and then topping the walls with large, flat
slabs of gneiss (Fig. 5). Smaller
courses of gneiss were placed on top of the cap stones before the dirt
was piled on. These
are visible where the tree was uprooted (Fig. 6).
A similar type construction, called a
‘comb roof’ was found at a cist grave site near Sharpsburg,
Maryland, in
1884 (Stewart 1981: 7). The
dirt that was probably excavated from a ditch can be seen as low,
indistinct mounds to either side of the souterrain.
The
façade consists of two
to three courses of gneiss piled one on top of the
other and topped by a large slab of the gneiss, in a post-and-lintel
construction. The
entrance itself is a tight squeeze, measuring only 16” high
by 22” wide, smaller than what Whittall described, and
difficult for anyone but a small thin person or a child to negotiate
(See Fig. 4).
Rather
than entering the souterrain through the real
entrance, it is much easier to lower oneself into the collapsed
portion, as Whittall and others have done, and then creep along the
remaining twenty-five feet to the end.
The actual tunnel is 37.9’ long from the
entrance to the back wall. It
is a tight fit, with the width a narrow 24-26” and the height
gradually increasing from 42” near the collapsed portion to
60” at the end (Fig. 7).
This is not a place for a claustrophobic, or one
fearful of large, albino spiders that inhabit the dark interior of the
chamber. At the
very end the tunnel widens into a beehive-like chamber built against a
ledge that is just large enough to sit down in comfortably. It is not a very inviting
place, and one doesn’t care to linger there too long.
Whittall
and Barron both concluded that the Montville
‘souterrain’ resembles those found in Ireland,
which date from the Iron Age: ca
A.D. 500-1000. Not
having visited them or those in southern Britain,
I am in a poor position to comment.
Based on what I have read, however, the Montville
example does bear a slight resemblance to those in the British
Isles, except that the latter are generally much
wider and taller, and also have side passages with a small entrance
called a creep, such as we find in the fogou of Boleigh, in Cornwall. These examples date from
about 100 B.C. to the first centuries of the Christian era, and various
theories have been proposed as to their function, such as for storage
or refuge, since they are generally close to human settlements. One other possibility,
suggested by Ian Cooke in his book Mother and
Sun, is that they had a religious or ceremonial function. I like this idea best of
all with respect to the Montville
structure. The
outline of the souterrain as seen from above has the appearance of a
serpent, with the chamber at the end representing the head (see Fig. 5).
The
size and structure of the Montville
souterrain make it highly unlikely that it was used for any kind of
storage: the constricted size of the entrance and tunnel and the length
of the passageway to the small chamber at the end contradict this
interpretation. It
is certainly unlike any of the stone chambers Neudorfer said were used
for storage (1980). In
fact, the narrow entrance implies that it was deliberately constructed
to make it difficult to enter. Perhaps
it was intended to be a frightening experience for those entering the
darkened interior without the aid of a light source.
Furthermore, unlike the fogous or souterrains of Britain,
it is not near any former settlement.
Instead, it located on a lonely, dark hill, far from
the road, and surrounded only by dozens of stone cairns
of various shapes perched on boulders, which seem to begin at about the
same level on the hill and extend up to the summit (Mavor & Dix
1989: 259). It is
on the east end of the ridge, that one finds the large, fractured,
perched boulder of gneiss, in which the bottom section has seemingly
been pushed out of place, perhaps by frost action (Mavor & Dix
1989: 111c) The
same kind of violent rupture occurred in a split boulder in the Morgan
R. Cheney Audubon Sanctuary nearby.
Severely fractured and offset boulders such as these
seem commonplace in Montville,
and many of them appear to have been ritualized by placing stones on
them and between the broken segments.
Could these, I wonder, have been dislodged around
the same time, perhaps during a short period of extremely severe
weather, or even from the effects of a violent earthquake?
Montville History
Viewed
against the
backdrop of Montville
history, certain aspects of the souterrain begin to be clarified. Montville
is a small town situated on the west side of the Thames
River,
halfway between New London
and Norwich,
and was formerly called the North Parish of New London.
It was first settled in 1653 by Richard Houghton and
James Rogers, who were granted land by Uncas, the Mohegan chieftain. In 1703, North Parish was
added to New London
by a grant of the General Court, but Montville
was not incorporated as a town until the mid-1700s.
Beaver
Dam Hill, on which the ‘souterrain’ is found, was
part of an area designated as “common land” on a
1730 map prepared by Joshua Hempsted, a county surveyor, as was the
large and ill defined area to the north across Hunt’s Brook. A copy of this map is in
the Raymond, Connecticut,
public library. This
land was not deeded to anyone, but was for the use of the townsfolk,
perhaps for wood harvesting. Small
farms at this time were clustered around Unger or Moxley
Street, about three-quarters of
a mile southeast of Beaver Dam Hill, where Fire
Street now begins, and near the
junction of Fire Street
and East Lake Road
to the west. The
area in between was not developed until Fire
Street was laid out in 1772. Thereafter, a couple of
farmhouses were constructed west of the junction with Unger
Street, but none in the
immediate vicinity of the souterrain.
One of the farmhouses on the west end of Fire
Street belonged to a C.
Beckwith, who had built a sawmill along Hunt’s or Alewife
Brook, just northwest of the souterrain, across the brook. The mill may have become
operational just after the road was surveyed and laid out, and it
remained viable until at least 1854, after which it was abandoned.
There
is no physical evidence that the land around the souterrain was ever
inhabited. No old
cellar holes dot the hillside, and there are no stone walls defining
property lines except some on the other side of Beaver Dam Hill. The terrain is steep and
rocky and hardly suitable for farming.
Sal Trento,
in his book Field Guide to Mysterious Places
of Eastern North
America, conveys the story that in the early 1600s the land
on which the souterrain is found was originally given to a John Brown,
who was a crew mate of John Winthrop, an early governor of Massachusetts. Trento
states: “When Brown died he had no heirs, and he did not
leave the land to any of his friends.
For unknown reasons, no one during the last 160
years squatted or claimed the land.
It has mysteriously avoided ownership, almost as if
it were cursed soil.” However
fascinating the story, I have found no truth to it.
The Stone Row
A clue to
the
original function of the souterrain may lie with a curious and very
well made stone row, 147 feet long, situated several hundred
feet west.
During the
colonial period, walls were generally constructed of stones
dislodged
in fields by plowing, and were carried by stone boat to the edges of
the field, where they were piled into the rustic walls that
define the New
England landscape.
Many of them form networks with other walls. However, the one on Beaver
Dam Hill is different, in that it is an isolated segment with no
indication that it was ever connected to a wooden rail fence. A trace of low stones
beyond where the present wall begins and ends would provide a clue that
a rail fence continued at either end, but nothing of the sort
is to be
found. Instead, the
wall or row in question is finished at both ends, implying a function
quite distinct from the usual colonial usage.
Some
of the boulders comprising it are huge: one is six feet long, a foot
thick and two feet wide, and weighs close to a ton.
I believe the row bears a direct relationship to the
souterrain.
As
viewed head on at the top, the row has a curious, repetitive
post-and-lintel construction (Fig. 8), consisting of one or two smaller
rocks supporting a larger, flat slab.
However,
when viewed from the side, (Fig. 9), the
pattern of stones seems to merge into the shape and detail of a
serpent’s head, with an unusual square stone representing
the eye, and the arrangement of long rectangular stones below,
the
mouth
(Fig. 10). Some may
say I am reading too much into the stone arrangement, but Indian stone
constructions representing snakes or turtles are often very subtle,
with only a few accents providing a clue as to what they represented. For example, a stone mound
in Hopkinton, Rhode
Island might look like
just another
pile (Fig. 11), but Doug Harris, Historic Preservation Officer
of the
Narragansett Tribe, pointed out that one stone represents a head, and
two other flat stones are suggestive of the carapace (Fig. 12).
As
we follow the stone
wall down slope to the north, off to the left (west), is a small stone
circle, within which are some carefully laid flat slabs (Fig. 13). It is hard to know what
this feature represents, or even whether it is very old. The carefully laid stone
base is curious, and while some might conclude that it was a fireplace,
I have found no evidence of charcoal or carbon residue on the stones.
A
bit farther north from this point is a disturbed portion of the row
that might be interpreted as a spot where a tree fell.
It is about 25 feet from the end of the row, which
concludes in a step and is finished the same way as the other end. What I find interesting
about this spot, which measures about eight feet across and three feet
wide, is that in the center is an upright curved stone, firmly embedded
in the ground and pointing almost due east (Fig. 14).
The
small standing
stone is shown at the bottom
center of the image on edge. By
taking a compass bearing along the axis of the stone, and using a long
tape measure, I was able to determine that the stone pointed to within
ten feet of the opening of the souterrain.
Was this sheer coincidence?
I’m not so sure.
There also seemed to be a line of cairns
leading in the direction of the souterrain.
Assuming the row does represent a serpent, the
location of the small upright stone and disturbed portion of the row is
located near the cloaca of a live snake from which eggs are laid. Snakes were considered
powerful and generally dangerous creatures associated with the
underworld, and were able to transform themselves by shedding their old
skin. We might
hypothesize a connection between the stone row and the
‘souterrain’ involving ritualistic birth and
rebirth in a vision quest ritual.
If this were the case, an initiate could have
crawled down the length of the souterrain and remained there for a day
or more, an undoubtedly frightening experience, which might have
symbolized being swallowed and eventually reborn.
It
should be pointed out that stone snake effigies are not uncommon in the
Northeast. Two have
been found on Overlook
Mountain
in Woodstock, NY. One was mentioned by Glenn
Kreisberg in his article “The California Quarry and Nearby
Stone Cairns of Woodstock, NY” (Kreisberg 2007). A web article on a
possible water serpent in Vermont
listed other examples of stone serpents (Muller 2007)
Conclusion
Any
proposed
explanation of the souterrain comes up against the dilemma that there
is nothing else quite like it in New England. David Barron once showed
me a photograph of a similar tunnel like structure with capstones that
was uncovered in New London
years ago. There is
also the long complex of tunnels with capstones in Goshen,
Massachusetts,
that were examined by Whittall and later Trento
(1997: 149-155). None
of these is exactly like the Montville
example, although their construction is similar.
If the possibilities I have advanced above have any
validity, they should be substantiated by similar examples, but the
souterrain is the only feature of its type that has been discovered in New
England.
In
December 1984,
Whittall wrote a letter, together with maps and drawings of the
souterrain, to Terry Ross, a well-known dowser.
Whittall asked Ross to conduct pendulum dowsing on
the materials in order to help answer the questions surrounding the
structure. Whittall
asked Ross to try to determine when the structure was built, to which
Ross replied about 310 B.C. Whittall
also inquired about what it was used for, and Ross responded that it
might have been used as a ceremonial or ritual
‘temple.’ Finally,
Whittall asked where there might be found similar structures. Ross pinpointed two
locations north of the souterrain, in the area near the
“Montville Complex,” where there are two unusual
stone chambers (Barron 1984b; Venema 1984).
Neither of these possible sites has been checked out.
While
a number of
people have crawled the length of the ‘souterrain,’
and have speculated about its use, all comments, including my own, have
been based largely on simple observation, not material analysis. It is this last
methodology that should be addressed.
We could start with the interior, which has not been
overly disturbed. Until
the souterrain was rediscovered in 1984, it is doubtful if anyone had
crawled the length of the tunnel in modern times, since dirt had
obstructed the portion where the tree had been uprooted. There is no evidence the
souterrain was known prior to 1938.
Thus, whatever might be discovered on the floor of
the tunnel and in the chamber at the very end could be very significant. This might involve
analyzing the dirt and anything found in it, such as pollen, plus the
soil covering the capstones. To
do this, one would have to get in touch with the present owner, whoever
that might be. When
I inquired about ownership ten or so years ago, I was told that the
owner’s surname was Dart, and that no taxes had been paid on
the property for more than 100 years!
This might present an opportunity to purchase the
souterrain and the property around it outright, and then conduct a
sensitive excavation to determine, once and for all, when the feature
was constructed, which, in turn, might help in determining its original
purpose. As one of
the most intriguing stone features in all the Northeast, the souterrain
is certainly worthy of further study.
*
This
article was previously published in the NEARA Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, Winter 2007, p.27f.
References
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David 1984.
“Hunt’s Brook Site Souterrain –
‘Fabulous Discovery’!” Stonewatch,
Newsletter of the Gungywamp Society, 4.
------,
1984b.
“Atrium Chamber Site (C6-25), Montville,
Connecticut,”
Early Sites Research Society Bulletin,
11 (1), 3-6.
Cooke,
Ian M. 1993. Mother
and Sun: The Cornish Fogou, Cornwall.
Fell,
Barry 1983.
“Christian Messages in Old Irish Script Deciphered from Rock
Carvings in W. VA,” Wonderful West Virginia
47 (1), (1983), 12-19. Also
posted online at http://cwva.org/wwvrunes/wwvrunes_3.html.
Kreisberg,
Glenn 2007.
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Quarry and Nearby Stone Cairns
of Woodstock, NY,”
NEARA Journal.
Also posted at: http://ashnews.org/Documents/NEARA_Submission_022007_MSWord_97.doc.
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James & Byron
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http://rock-piles.com/R7-2.
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Giovanna 1980. Vermont’s
Stone Chambers: An Inquiry Into Their Past.
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Historical Society, Barre.
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Brendan
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Monroe &
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of Maryland,”
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York, 181-185.
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shrouded in secrets,” Norwich
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