Have you ever travelled thru the forest and have come upon the terrain that had pits and mounds that is sometimes referred to as pillows and cradles which is the result of a tree or trees being blown over by wind sometimes by thunderstorm microburst or straight line winds when the soil is saturated or hurricanes. The cradle is the depression caused by the roots torn out of the ground and the pillows is the soil around the roots that drop to the ground as the trunk and roots decay.

This area of pillows and cradles might have been from 1938 hurricane that came thru New England and cradles have flatten out over the course time.

In areas where there is a few or more of pillows and cradles you can see if each are in the same direction this might indicate a single event or are they different directions which might mean different trees were blown over at different times with winds from different directions.

I might suggest an interesting book called “Reading the Forested Landscape – A Natural History of New England” by Tom Wessels published by The Countryman Press

In the book Tom Wessels has drawings of different forest scenes and then goes into discussions about what is there and indications of what it might have look like 100 years ago.Such as stone walls and rock piles which suggest that this land was once open farm land and if the walls were just large stones, it might have been pasture land. The rock piles or smaller stones pile on top of the walls would indicate that the land continually tilled for food production rather than for just livestock.