Stone Cairns

About This Structure

Five pyramid-shaped stone constructs arranged on Lot 15, originally dubbed "Pirate Piles" by the late Fred Nolan. The cairns point toward the swamp. In Season 11, archaeoastronomer Professor Adriano Gaspani analyzed the positioning of the cairns and determined they were built in alignment with the stars, sun, and the moon's position in the night sky. By calculating how long ago those alignments were exact, Gaspani dated their construction to approximately 1250 AD - the same period he attributes to Nolan's Cross (dated 1200 AD). Gaspani concluded that both monuments were built by the same group and attributed the work to the Knights Templar. Metal detecting near the cairns by Gary Drayton recovered a decorated lead strip suspected to be medieval. Analysis revealed similarities to a twisted lead artifact from Lot 13 with Scandinavian origins, raising the possibility of Viking involvement alongside the Templars.

William S. Crooker, writing from a 1992 interview with Fred Nolan, gives a different count and geometry from the five cairns described above. Nolan told Crooker that three piles of stones formed the corners of a triangle in the shape of an arrowhead on top of the hill just outside the eastern boundary of his property, with sides of about 150 feet and a base of about 100 feet, the point aimed directly at the centre of the swamp. He gave their diameters as about twelve feet and their heights as about five feet, said they had always been considered an old observation place, and noted that one had since been destroyed. Nolan drew lines through these piles and through two ring bolts on his land to position his 1963-64 shafts, and later found a sandstone survey monument on the prolongation of the triangle's median line. Crooker also connects the piles to a nineteenth-century story in which a searcher named Pickles, working from a chart supplied by a Captain Allen, was told the island he sought had three piles of stones and an old well. The discrepancy between Nolan's three piles and the five cairns surveyed in Season 11 has not been reconciled.