Old Hand Dug Holes Found And What Took Me There

[payne]

although nature has taken her toll on a lot of these signs you can still see the rabbit. the hole carved to make the eye is about 18 inches wide. I could recognize it from across the valley. i'm sure it stood at least 6' before it collapsed. google earth marked it at exactly 2.6 miles from the other corner. which is all right on with what you're saying. if I remember right it also had the v notch on the other side with smaller drill holes. that's what lets me know i'm not just seeing things!

First off, please excuse my 5yr old style mark up! I was curious if I was seeing this correctly?

Also, what type of meaning(s) does rabbit represent on the trail?

 

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[dsty]

For the most part it means the same as they all do, directional, a corner marker, monument, trail marker, are the holes on the other side mrble size, 3mm ? I agree with your mark-up

 

[dsty]

This is just my opinion for a couple of reasons, I think with everything going on out west they ( surveyors ) may have set the 1 league square all over the country, perhaps folks have so many markers around, all the clutter, kinda like the freeways around L.A. and the different signs that identify the roads, the Spanish may have had the same thing going on, they could look at a monument and tell if it goes on the road they are following. I believe they started surveying in the S.E. corner and one party went west, one party went north surveying the League square each leaving the trail markers Monuments as they went. Then another party started at the SE corner and went to the NW corner leaving trail marker's as they went. When they got to the NW corner they created the yard near the NW corner got everything figured out and set about digging the hole to leaving the reward for the settlers. It may be the same thing out west. I STILL believe that the answer lies in the different, features / size / distance / degree's. If you are looking for a league square and they are on 360 / 270 / 180 / 90 degrees there's no reason to follow a trail that's running 230 / 330 degrees, as far as directions to a mine they will be all everywhere, following the canyon floor. Distance may be verified by the pace / distance between markers should be verified by the size of the of the marker, One thing that I can't find is the Soldiers Pace, its probably used on the Royal Trail which would identify it as such

 

[Shortstack]

dsty:
I wonder if the Soldier's Pace you're looking for could be 40 inches. I'm sure you've heard the old military cadence call, ".....dress it right and cover down. Forty inches all around." Most military units of any country that I've seen, march pretty much the same.....except for the North Koreans. They march using a modified "goose step". And the Hesbola / Hamas use a jogging half step.

 

[tinhorn]

Dsty,

yes, there was at least one 1" dh on the other side but the opposite side suffered a lot more damage in the fall. and the footing was bad which made it hard to get good photos. However about 50' west of it was a much smaller rock with a beautiful 1' dh. another thing to note is that this large corner was facing back toward the smaller one.

 

[Rawhide]

Very interesting thread. I like the way dsty could count out paces and recognize a empty hole when he seen one. I think dsty has put out some very good info here, and it could be the making of a new book on how to hunt the old trails.Here are some drill holes in a lobe of a buried heart, mixed in with some other signs. There is a monk looking guy carved into the hole up top. But drill holes are fun to find.

This one is for tinhorn. Here is a heart marking a entrance, some folks will say that dont exist. The heart has a map on it that includes another heart. Its called a heart within a heart.
Its a little slow to load, you getting a full untouched photo here.

This is the hole, there is a stone missing in the photo of a black cat. Mayans used to mark thier holes that way.

 

[rangler]

trackers,
a pace is twice as long as a vara, a pace is measured from left foot then the right then the left again~! from my research mostly pirate related walking distance, although a braza happens to be about 6' which mimics the pace.
the true vara is 34" from my research, then there was the mexican vara of 30" and the walking or military vara of 32"
from my experience these measurements are not vital for finding the dig spot. most are coded in with lines. convergent for accuracy. even centuries later.
oro for those who pay attention to the fine details...
rangler

ps the word 'pace' has taken the place in modern times for the word 'stride' in the ancient times of the codemakers a pace was measured as a Braza- at least in the spanish world. And was used as a hard rule for the minimum depth that the quint could be stashed at..unless the tax money was very sizable then the rule was "twice" the depth of a braza
which later was quoted that it was the height of king.but I think it was just lip service.

 

[desertmoons]

Dsty,i went out and measured a standing full figure elephant for ya. it was about 17 feet tall at the tallest part. I've got the length and orientation too but my notebook is not at hand. I will google earth it next week and see what comes up. So I thought to try 17 vara, 170 vara and 170 feet for the distances. Are there other measurements I should try?

The elephant has a notch in its back, and siting through the notch does point out an elephant head in the distance , which is unusual. The standing elephants orientation to me indicates some other purpose though.

Also, here is a rock with what i think is a half drill hole. The groove is half circle in nature, lays 45 degrees and seems to point to the start of a royal trail. There is a full fledged drill hole on this rock too that generally speaking points the way to water and campsites and associated things. I forgot to measure the depth and circumference duh..had a goal and this was just along the way.

 

[dsty]

Hi, Kim, Its sometimes a guestion if what points to what, I believe that it does both, You can see it from a long distance and if it changes direction then there's something to look at there, if it looks at a Royal Trail ( big / important ) Or something at a long distance Your 17 ft high elephant is in my opinion is a little less than 18 divide by 6 = 3 leagues, a corner marker was used sometimes ( long / High ) referenced to a league, I'm almost certain that without all the undergrowth that was present at that time because of those animals that foraged the markers could be seen from 2.5 miles, Kenworthy's book references a white boulder could be seen for 8.5 miles, then you need to look above the white boulder, perhaps the roll of the hills leaves a clue, I look at the road side signs and think that one is about 2/3 miles from here and then look at the odometer to check how close I came, it's just a rough estimate but it helps to judge distances. Just a stop sign will show up a mile away. I don't know if I have said anything concerning Old Maps using London as a reference point

 

[Rawhide]

They eye catcher stone dsty talks about is how I got into trails in the first place. A lot of Kenworthys ideas can be found in the trail. I never thought of looking above the eye catcher, but I do search the area for other clues. If you take what they could travel in a day, its makes sense to me. I dont just follow one trail, but I follow it where ever it takes me. I have found many sites this way, more than 100 people could work in ten years.

I start with what I call far signs, and work my way in. As the signs get smaller(usually), the closer you are. A large elephant can mean a large deposit not just distance. I have followed elephant heads from a large elephant to a pair of owls. This lead to other discovery's.

Ranglers explanation has some truth in it, but not because of a exact distance. Pirates and others did indeed pace off things. I like dsty's explanation as it is something you can see from google earth. Can you imagine how many of these corner stones have been destroyed due to expansion? Its getting harder and harder to find stuff. Not to mention some of this stuff is several hundred years old. As DM says, I try to follow the royal trail as she calls it.

This is one of the first signs I found, its a duck. When I line this duck up with another duck, I get a spot that needs to be looked at real hard. No markers or measurement needed, just a idea of how they did things. The duck is also part of a marker about a 1/4 mile away that is very visible but not easily accessible. This is a real good example of how signs will lead you away and into harms way. The big round egg lookingstone is also about the same distance as the marker with the duck. This spot actually leads to two different spots.

This is one of the egg shaped stone. I believe its size will convey a distance dsty has talked about. No reference in picture, but this is large. There is actually two of them very close together, not sure what that is about.

This is a large elephant I mentioned earlier. I cant really show the eye catchers or the elephant heads I have enough company out here.

 

[dsty]

SS I really do believe a solders, pace, step, and it may reference the British soldier's, at this time everything I look at has the British reference to it. I believe the Masons got their start their start there, Old Maps Reference the distance as being from London which I think is a good clue to who the suveyors were, not Spain, Portugal, Egypt or any other country, That's just my thoughts and they do have lots of older buildings and they may have had a hand in the Stonehenge, Pyramids and so forth, I believe you can tell a Royal Trail by the size of the markers, distance between them, they seem to follow streams and valleys when possible and it seems that Kenworthys thoughts about having a In and a Out was the Law, However I do Not betieve that it referenced the league square for the settlers. I believe that the Royal Trail was used by The Goverment / Military / Treasuery and it in my mind was by the Stone Masons, which gave birth to offshoots to other parties / KGC being one of them. All this is just my thoughts I do not have any proof at all on anything. I'M braced for your thoughts Rangler

 

[Shortstack]

dsty:
As I just posted on another thread.......The King of Spain had his hands full trying to run the Moors out of his country during the early to mid 1300s and that couldn't have been cheap. He got the assistance of Robert de Bruce and Sir James Douglas and their army of Scottish Knights to detour to Spain from their journey to the Holy Lands for the Crusades. Both Robert and Sir James were killed in the fighting there. Now, this could have been a big catalyst for his sending the Spanish vandals to Mexico and, later, the area now called America in search of gold and silver. With his needing to replenish the royal treasury, why in the world would he "settle" for a measly 5 percent UNLESS he had to rely on private "grubstakers" to fund the expeditions because he was broke and HAD to accept the low percentage.

The Moors were stopped in their quest for dominance of what is now Europe, without their ever getting to the British Isles. Somewhere in this time period, the Knights Templar were being double crossed by the Vatican and the King of France with the survivors going to England and changing their organization into the Scottish Rites folks. That is really interesting considering that the had to move on up into the area of Scotland because the King of England was having his hands full of rebellious Scotsmen around the same time. Yep, William Wallace had been captured and executed in 1314, but Robert de Bruce took up the fight for Scottish independence from England. When he died in Spain fighting the Moors, his son, ascended to the throne of Scotland. England never really stopped trying to gain control of Scotland, so the times were still unsettling in that part of the world. That's probably one of the main reasons the Knights Templar (or the Scottish Rites Temple ) left there for North America.

With all of that intrigue going on, not even counting the double dealing Jesuits, the question of the Kings "cut" of the goodies produced by the vandal expeditions to the "new world" is really illogical. I really don't think the King of Spain was ever let in on the big secret.......the expeditions were following information about ancient mining that was done in the new world and were in fact concentrating on those trails first and any discoveries of their own were just gravy. UNLESS he DID know and was thinking the size of the ancient mining caches were so huge that the mere 5 percent would have been plenty. Doesn't really sound like a greedy King does it?? Hmmm............weren't kings in those days wanting the lion's shares of discoveries made by the expeditions supposedly representing the crown ??

It's getting LATE and my mind is fogging up. GNite.

 

[dsty]

Thank's SS a 40 inch step and your expaination of the series of steps that was was taken will very possibly work, Thank You

 

[Rawhide]

dsty, average terrain you have to add 10% to your range due to the rise and fall of the land. Most sites I seem to find are very elevated, so 10 steps wont get you very far. By the time you hit a league, you would be way off. I think they measured things in minutes and hours. I could be wrong.

 

[Shortstack]

Thank's SS a 40 inch step and your expaination of the series of steps that was was taken will very possibly work, Thank You

dsty:
I've been mulling this "pace" thing over and over in my mind and started remembering how when I went through Army Basic, then AIT, were taught that the point man in a file, while running a compass course, needed to keep count of the number of paces (steps) he'd taken while on each leg of the course.....the counts between turning points, especially. The actual length was not important because it was for REFERENCE, not an exact distance. Through the jungle or over hill and dales or ridges and gullies, a pace was considered to be the same average for each man. Soooo, I wonder if the "Soldier's Pace" that you mentioned, is to be considered the average for the men of the times and was intended to get the following groups into the immediate AREA of the next needed information or goodie site, and not to an EXACT spot. Does that make any sense??

 

[dsty]

Hello SS, the 40 inch solders pace was a referense to Kenworthys off the trail markers 100 / 200 / 300 solders pace is where there may be more info, I thought that a 40 inch pace might tear something loose or perhaps a need put in a good supply of Ben-Gay, it may have been in reference to a horses step / pace, I try to remember that we are dealing with mighty smart folks and somethimes the best of folks miss speak leave a word out and we need to fill-in the needed information ( no one is perfect Sooooo be aware ).

 

[dsty]

It looks to me like Payne and Tinhorn may be working the same site what's the deal please explain

 

[payne]

It looks to me like Payne and Tinhorn may be working the same site what's the deal please explain

Definitely not, at least I certainly hope not for tins sake! No offense tin, but I'd hate to have to sick the dogs on ya!

It does look like we may be on the same side of the country, but I'd say Tins a good but north of me based on some of his posts. Other than one of his posts, it seems as though our geology is significantly different. Also, other than drill holes, I haven't seen him post any of the same critters. I am curious though, what similarities do you see that drew you to that conclusion?

 

[dsty]

Thank's Clay, My goodness that that takes me back aways, how's everything going, working with someone to get a book of sort's started. It may help some folks, there's lots of things that havent been discussed yet. Tell the family Hi

 

[dsty]

Those that have a posible cache site in a league square and have found a yard full of different type's of carved head's, letter's and number's, most seem to be in all of them such as a upside down V, snake head, turtle head, and other's, It's just a guess on my part but some may identify them as the group responsible, such as a fish, frog, turtle, pig and so forth. anyway it seems those that are common don't seem do do anything except using it as a filler, cause more confusion,