Admirals Cove Park, Halifax County

ADMIRALSPK.gpx gps location file

Rock at the Eagles Nest

Terry's map from Memory

Brian's plotted GPS track

Summer Cove Inscriptions

It was a beautiful, warm, sunny evening, with the sun low in the northwest casting lots of shadow, so I decided it was the perfect time for Elizabeth and I to take a stroll around Admirals Cove to look for the famous inscriptions supposed to be there.

The following page shows the most interesting of these inscriptions:
http://www.nsexplore.ca/bird/untitled-scanned-85.jpg
(except Figure 2, which is the Lily Lake Petroglyph found somewhere else).

I have uploaded a map in the Files section called AdmiralsRockParkMap.gif; the thin red line on this map is the GPS track of my excursion, and my waypoints are shown in tiny yellow
labels. I will post photos after my film is developed.

We parked near the Park Entrance Sign at the top of the last hill before the end of Shore Road. This is the closest access point without crossing private property. The trail is pretty obvious, but stay to the right; this takes you directly to the water; there are numerous
trails going off on the left to other interesting places.

G1 – The first inscription I saw. All along the shore, and a few metres inland as well, between G1 and G5, there are hundreds of inscriptions. So many, in fact, that they overlap each other two or even three deep. G1 is a boulder just in from the shore. The
inscriptions on it look old, but colonial, or younger. Mostly carved initials.

G2 – Another boulder close by with carved initials and English names. There are several others in this area that I didn’t bother to highlight. It must have been a popular pastime to carve initials and names on boulders in this cove at one time.

G3 – I am going to skip G3 for now, and come back to it. It is a nearly vertical rock face, right on the water. Just to the left of the exact waypoint is the oldest dated carving that I saw, and one of the best preserved as well; it a person’s name and is dated 1932.

G4 – This smooth sloping rock is a Goldenville Formation outcrop, but its surface much softer than the typical Goldenvile greywacke. It appears to have a high feldspar content, which weathers to kaolin, rendering the outer crust of the rock very soft. This sloping surface
is where the greatest number of inscriptions are found, all names, initials, dates, etc. All English (maybe the odd French). The oldest date I saw here is 1938. It appears that soil is developing over this outcrop, and I’m pretty sure older inscriptions would be found on the
left if the soil is removed.

G5 – This is at the very crest of a high ledge over the water. There is a sort of step, or mini terrace, and there are inscriptions on the vertical face of the step. More names, initials, dates, English and French. The oldest date I saw here is 1959.

At this point, the mosquitoes and black flies were bugging Elizabeth too much, so I took her home and came back to resume the excursion.

G3 – I want to come back and discuss G3 because it is so different from all the others. It is the set of 5 hieroglyphic symbols labelled (1) on the web page referenced above. It is on a large flat, almost vertical rock face, at sea level, about chest high. The greywacke is
quite hard at this location, but this rock face is also coated with a veneer of quartz, making it even harder. There once was a thin sheet/vein of quartz in the bedrock, a very large block broke off, leaving the quartz sheet exposed on the rock face. This carving is
superb. The lines are crisp and clean, the curves are smooth and lovely. This is the work of a true professional. He chose a place where his work could be easily seen from the water, and would persist for a very long time. I don’t know how one might date this
inscription, but if someone told me that it was thousands of years old, I would have no problem believing it. It truely is remarkable, and unlike anything else I have seen in Nova Scotia.

Except for one point of similarity with the Yarmouth Fletcher (Runic) stone: that stone also has its inscription carved onto a quartz veneer, over top of a Goldenville formation stone. It makes sense that an authentic inscription carver would want to carve his message on the
very hardest stone he could find, so it would survive better, especially if it was at the edge of the ocean. I think this observation is significant, and bolsters the circumstantial evidence
for the authenticity of both inscriptions. Pranksters, it would seem to me, would be happy to use less effort on softer stone. Indeed, the 5 hieroglyphics take up only a small area of the large vertical rock face, but despite all the other carvings on softer rock nearby, no one
else took the effort required to carve on that quartz veneer. The hieroglyphics have that prime area all to themselves.

The other 4 images on that web page (figures 3 and 4) are supposed to be nearby, but despite a lot of hunting around, I couldn’t find them. Perhaps someone else would like to go looking for them on one of these fine evenings.

PE6 – The perched erratic slab that I have previously called “Desk on Edge”. It appears to have some faint inscription on it, but I couldn’t make it out; too worn.

I continued following the shoreline southeastwards, carefully checking every plat that I thought and inscription of any kind might be found. They were almost non-existent after waypoint G5.

G6 – A nice clear chiselled name and date, above eye level on a very large boulder on the beach. I think the date was 1972.

INCLUSION – Not an inscription, but an interesting bit of geology. The bedrock and most of the boulders here are of the Goldenville formation. It was formed about 550 million years ago, and is normally considered the oldest kind of rock in southern Nova Scotia. This rock
was initially formed by deep ocean sediments selling and accumulating offshore on a continental slope. The water was over 1 km deep and very cold, near the South Pole at the time. There must have been glaciers on some continental land mass nearby, now long gone, and every so often icebergs would calf off and float out to sea, and partially
melt. As they did so, they would occassionally release a stone that had been trapped in the ice when it was scrapping the continental land mass. Once released, the stone would fall through the kilometre of water and settle in the sediments at the bottom of the ocean. 550
million years later, those sediments are now our bedrock, and the little piece of gneiss (I think that’s what it is) that is exposed as an inclusion in a beach boulder here is a little time capsule from a time several hundred million years OLDER than the boulder that encloses it.

G7 – This is a curious inscription. There is a very clear X, that doesen’t appear to be of a great age, but near it there is a much older inscription that I found hard to read. I think I could see either an M or a W. It is on a medium-size stone (the size of a small suitcase) lying at the top of the beach, with a very flat horizontal surface.

WAVYROCK – This is a very curious section of exposed bedrock with wavy groves in it (they are very straight and regular). They might be sand ripples or they might be glacier gouge marks, but they are surprisingly straight regular and long. There are also two sets of
very regular cracks, one set running perpendicular to the groves, and the other set running at a 45 degree angle.

NATRLRNE – This is about as far as I could go, as the sun was set by this time, and twilight was closing in. Several of the boulders here have a very curious narural formation that looks an aweful lot like nordic runes. I’ll let the photo speak for itself, or if you can’t wait for that, go see it for yourself.

-Terry Deveau, June 17, 2003