Cellar holes, shallow wells and stone walls are about all of the signs that remain of our earliest settlers.

Stone-lined wells and holes of varying sizes can be found across the undeveloped remote sections of all of our towns, in the woods and along the ridges.

A lot can be learned about that early farm from what’s left if you take the time and know where to look.

Adair Mulligan, a biologist, historian and a cellar hole enthusiast from Lyme, is a speaker with the New Hampshire Humanities Council. She recently presented her program “A Walk Back in Time: The Secrets of Cellar Holes” to a rapt audience at the Chamberlin Free Public Library in Greenville. Her talk was built around an inventory of the structures in her town, how it was done and what the information can be used for.

An early study of Lyme’s population shifts is called “The Town That Went Down Hill.” The name wasn’t appreciated by the residents, but it’s an accurate description.

As the population moved west, where there is better farmland, poorer farms – usually those on hills and ridges – were abandoned and farmers moved to the valleys, where there was more soil, if not fewer rocks.

Rose Mountain in Lyndeborough was named for Abraham Rose, who came to town in 1789. By the 1850s, the family had moved to Center Road to the farm that now bears his name. That first house is a cellar hole somewhere on the mountain.

But a cellar hole can tell the observer at lot more than just where the house stood, Mulligan said.

“Where was the chimney?” she asked. “How many rooms were there, what type of building was it, what was it used for?”

Most early farmsteads were of the “Big House, Little House, Back House, Barn” configuration, but the cellar was generally only under the “big house,” the main living section. It was used for storage of vegetables and apples, “and probably that needed cider barrel.”

The ell, “the little house and back house” might have had a crawl space, and large barns sometimes had cellars, especially if on a hillside.

The “back house,” she said, “contained a lot more than the privy,” including workshops and woodshed. There was probably a dirt-floored carriage shed.

As a biologist, Mulligan looks for cultivated plants: the lilac bush that grew by the front door, the day lilies that were around the outhouse, an old apple tree among the maples that marked the orchard. She was alerted to one farmstead by a straight line of old maple trees that had lined the driveway.

Stone walls can tell you a lot, she said. The land was cleared by sheep pastures between 1820 and the Civil War, but the style of wall can tell you what the enclosed land was used for. If the wall has many small stones, it was farmed, put there each spring as the farmer prepared his field. If the stones are all large, it was pasture.

For a Heritage Commission or other group planning an inventory – and such lists should be made before the holes have been filled in by new landowners – “Begin with talking to the landowners, get their permission to look,” she said. “Hunters are a huge help; they know the woods. Look at the town history, the old maps.”

Of special value are the old white pine blister rust maps that are available in Concord.

“But study, don’t plunder,” she said. Take photographs, but leave anything found in place. “That is the archaeological record.”

The best times to do field trips, she said, is “mud season and fall after the leaves have fallen, even if that is hunting season. Wear blaze orange.”

While there are state laws that protect stone walls, particularly those that mark boundaries, “There are no laws protecting cellar holes,” Mulligan said.

There are liability laws, however, that protect the landowner if somebody falls into a cellar hole.

“They can’t sue you if you’ve done nothing at the site,” she said. “But newcomers are afraid of them, don’t like them and fill them in.”

The old holes are fascinating, she said: “A window on what life was like.”

They deserve to be preserved.

Keep up with the past with Another Perspective, which runs every other week in The Telegraph. Jessie Salisbury can be reached at 654-9704 or jessies@tellink.net.