But if the cross is a part of a standard survey practice there should be other examples of it.
What is standard can be found from reading Vitruvius, because he was still the main influence on design, architecture and planning in the early Georgian period (he's the influence on proportion that Leonardo used in his Vitruvian man in the Renaissance). The planning that Morris did in NS at various Townships shows the use of basic 2:1, 3:1 and 3:2 proportions. From that, all of geometry can be coaxed out, so nothing regular is out of place. There are crosses everywhere the road meets the lot boundaries. They just don't get presented as that, because they don't stick out as being anything but 90 degree angles.
The NC alignment's heading is not arbitrary. It doesn't randomly land on 30NE and 50NE of the road heading by chance. Neither does the appearance of the 40 degree angle that is internal to NC. Someone made that happen. It could be anyone between 1762 and 1980, but it may help us to know that another feature related to it geometrically (the Welling pointer) is from at least the 1890s. I'm not against the idea that it was imagined by some surveyor as a feature of some symbolic plan. A feature of a plan need not have any involvement in the signaling of anything treasure related below the surface, though.
It is only because we know of the Cygnus mythologies that are found in Freemasonry that we can surmise that this is what was working as an inspiration for a plan of the island that shows some Geo-metry and Astro-metry references (doesn't have to be a faithful 1:1 mapping of anything either). Pointing North is a symbolic act too. That idea is not as wild a suggestion as it appears. It is as mundane a suggestion as saying that churches were built facing East for symbolic reasons or that Jerusalem was to be seen as a spiritual pole for this globe (akin to a North star). I think we can eliminate Nolan from the role of planner here, because I don't think he was motivated by anything that he didn't appreciate. He saw that alignment as evidence of British military surveying (we know that was his view). He most likely got the right man associated with it in Charles Morris (he charted Mahone Bay for the Royal Navy in 1751), but I don't think he really understood why Morris would have preferred the heading he did for the road and it's perpendicular lot boundaries when he surveyed in 1762. The Archibalds of Truro are a different story. When they showed up later they may have had an inkling of the symbolism and THEY may have used it to adorn all the accounts we have that are unreliable. So, we would then inherit what looks like evidence of the Masonic mythologies.
By making stories align they could have benefited form the interest that this would have created for those investors who could be sold on the Christian mythologies. If you want to delve into what was in Charles Morris head at the time, you'll have to read about his personal relationship to Erasmus James Philipps, the man who brought Freemasonry to NS in 1742 to the regiment that Morris belonged to. He left a deep symbolic mark on NS. Philipps died suddenly in 1760, and his death is a possible inspiration for Morris evoking some of the details of the stories Philipps introduced him to. He could have done so by orienting the plan in a preferential direction. It may be why the NC heading is the great circle heading from OI to Jerusalem. That smells like a symbolic detail to me. It's not random. Could Nolan have understood this to fake it? You be the judge. He lived his life a the time in such a way that he tried to make sense of it. I don't think he was faking activity to make his bogus suggestion look real, but we really do not know with eccentric people. They can be quite analytical in their delusions. All this to say that there is also another way to account for it being there. That other way happens to be be echoed in the searcher era accounts of details of the alleged pit. As I have motioned before, The NS author Thomas Haliburton was suggesting that as early as 1847, so let's be clear that the Masonic linkages are there in the skepticism of the mid 19th century. Halliburton knew the people involved, and I think he recognized the stories being borrowed from to suck the public interest.
What is perhaps most complicated in all this is the many twists and turns the OI story has taken since the first accounts generated a total of zero results. The older mythologies were then put aside and things slowly shifted to pirates, and eventually where we are today. There are still today variations on a theme of a relation to stars in this story. Creative license to go a million different ways with that is being seen. But what if the story was only really about the North star and its equivalent on the globe? It's too weak a suggestion to apparently sell books. lol
