Visit in July 2020

The Pandemic of 2020 completely demolished any hopes I had of ever attempting to visit any of the European Pile Dwellings locations, and it did its best to similarly affect that other collection of unobtrusive artifacts in obscure, out-of-the-way locations, the Struve Geodetic Arc. However, in the latter case I refused to be defeated. I originally had planned to see one or two of the locations in Lithuania, as many others have already done, but since that became problematic I needed to find another alternative. As luck would have it, the cluster of triangulation points in central-western Ukraine were not far from where I expected to be in late July, so I salvaged the opportunity to claim my Struve site visit by heading in that direction. Since it doesn’t seem that any of these locations have been seen by others here, I will add another Site review.

There are three points surrounding the city of Khmelnytski, one to the south, another to the southwest, and the third to the northwest. Whoever added the points to the Google map here on this site put the makers in the exact spot where the Struve points are, so a big thank you is due to whomever worked on that (you know who you are.) The point to the south of the city appears in Satellite View to be in the middle of a crop field at the moment, so I decided not to try for that one. The best of the three is the “Felschtyn” point, which is the one to the southwest, and about one kilometer south of the small town of Hvardiis'ke. The last section of road leading there is paved in its entirety, whether coming from the north or the south, but has numerous sections that are quite bumpy. There is no signage whatsoever in the vicinity of the marker, but if you look at the map closely before setting out, it would be hard to miss it. The point is located atop a small hill that is set back only twenty meters from the road, and surrounded by potato fields. It may be that the hill was man-made just for the survey, but I am not sure about that. A weedy footpath leads from the road to a staircase that takes one up the hill to the marker.

At the base of the hill is a large wooden Orthodox Cross and on top is a tall metal tripod and a modern stone monument. Directly beneath the tripod is the actual Struve Point, which in this case is a metal disk about 8 cm in diameter that has a few letters and numerals stamped on it that are too worn to read. The front of the stone has the typical two-sentence description of the site in Ukrainian and English, as well as its coordinates and the logo. On the back side is a nice etching, showing the scene pictured here.

I had intended to visit the third nearby location on the same morning, however access to that point would involve considerable distance along gravel roads, with the point itself located around one kilometer back from the nearest road. Satellite View seemed to indicate that it would be accessible, but I suspected that there might be even less to see at that point. Because of that, and given the rough condition of another gravel road I used earlier that morning, I decided that seeing only one point would probably be sufficient.

On the previous afternoon I took a nice walk through what is currently the easternmost parcel of the Primeval Beech Forests WHS, the small, but relatively easily accessible, forest near Sataniv. This is probably the only region where someone can visit both of these widely-distributed Sites within a 24-hour period (without burning copious amounts of jet fuel, of course.)