Another Day in the Woods

I started my explorations today at this old family graveyard, already recorded and mapped. I wanted to search the surrounding area for the old house site to which, one supposes, this graveyard was once attached. This proved to be far from simple.

Civil War soldiers sometimes created defensive barriers by felling groves of trees so that their branches faced toward the enemy, which they called an abatis. Nasty business. In this part of the world a field that has been abandoned for 50 or 60 years has often become a forest where old pine trees are now dying, being replaced by the hardwoods of the climax forest. Thus you can find places where the pine trees, which all started growing at the same time, are all dying and falling over at the same time. These fallen trees create a natural abatis nearly as impenetrable as the ones soldiers used to make. For good measure the fallen trees are usually covered with greenbriar. And that's what surrounded this little graveyard:

But I struggled through them as best I could, and after about an hour of climbing, ducking, squirming, and unsticking myself from thorns, I stumbled into a clearing of an old house site, marked by this fallen stone chimney: