The Stonehenge of Cape Ann
Whale’s Jaw, a rock that once resembled a whale’s mouth opening to the sky, has stood since the glaciers moved across Cape Ann and split the huge boulder in two. The pieces were left in place by the ice fields, with one standing 20 feet straight up and the other, slightly smaller, balanced at an angle. Together they bore a remarkable resemblance to the fearful, mighty sperm whale.
The rugged terrain of Dogtown is a product of the late Pleistocene epoch when glaciers — some a mile thick — spilled gigantic rocks and boulders across New England. As they moved along, the massive ice floes pushed, scraped, and lifted tons of rocks. When the last of the glaciers melted, it littered these rocks along the hilly spine of Cape Ann in the area now called Dogtown.
In 1989, a piece of the boulder broke off but Whale’s Jaw remains in place as it has for over 10,000 years.
