Sunday, March 13, 2011

Dighton Rock

The tide receded in the Taunton River exposing a sandstone rock that has been speculated about for centuries.........




Dighton Rock is a mysterious tide-washed boulder that juts up out of the Taunton River at Assonet Neck, just across from the town of Dighton, Massachusetts, and the Dighton Yacht Club. To yachtsmen sailing the river and even to some residents of Assonet Neck, it looks like just another rock, about eleven feet long and five feet high, standing where the river widens abruptly on its way to Mount Hope Bay and the Atlantic Ocean. Until recently, no road has led to it, and few travelers ventured to follow the unmarked path which took them to the site. Yet to historians and archeologists, the rock has been a focus of marvel and speculation ever since the year A.D. 1690, when the Reverend Cotton Mather, of witchcraft and brimstone fame, described it and the curious message engraved on its weathered, red-brown sandstone face.




Until recently, no road has led to it, and few travelers ventured to follow the unmarked path which took them to the site. Yet to historians and archeologists, the rock has been a focus of marvel and speculation ever since the year A.D. 1690, when the Reverend Cotton Mather, of witchcraft and brimstone fame, described it and the curious message engraved on its weathered, red-brown sandstone face.




“Among the other Curiosities of New-England,” Mather wrote 268 years ago in The Wonderful Works of God Commemorated, “One is that of a mighty Rock, on a perpendicular side whereof by a River, which at High Tide covers part of it, there are very deeply Engraved, no man alive knows How or When about half a score Lines, near Ten Foot Long, and a foot and half broad, filled with strange Characters: which would suggest as odd Thoughts about them that were here before us, as there are odd Shapes in that Elaborate Monument.…”







Who Really Engraved Dighton Rock?

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