Hovenweep Holly Group Four Corners Ceramic Art Tile
— — stone the solstice still finds.
Not only on a wall.
“Four small Pueblo ruins above Keeley Canyon, on the Colorado side of Hovenweep. The Holly Tower stands on a single boulder, the way it has for eight hundred years. A spiral cut into the cliff catches the summer-solstice sun for a few minutes around dawn, the same minutes the builders watched for. The road in is rough enough that most days nobody comes. The Square Tower Group, four miles west, is where the rangers and the cars are. Holly is where the wind is.
Hovenweep Holly Group Four Corners Ceramic Art Tile, on ceramic.
Each tile is finished by hand in our Knoxville studio. Artwork is slowly infused into the ceramic surface under high heat and pressure, and rests beneath a thin glossy finish. The colour lives in the surface, not on top of it.
Pick any four 4-inch tiles — National Parks you've been to, a Smokies set, the four seasons of one place. $ for a set of , cork-backed, ready to live on the table.
Each tile ships in a kraft box, tied with cream ribbon, with a handwritten note from the studio if you'd like to add one.
Three or five different vistas, hung together — a chapter of places you've been, or want to go.
The place, in three passes.
Hovenweep National Monument straddles the Colorado-Utah border on the Cajon Mesa, in the high desert of the Four Corners region. The Holly Group is one of six village clusters preserved within the monument, set on the Colorado side above Keeley Canyon in Montezuma County. The site holds four standing structures: Holly Tower, Tilted Tower, Boulder House, and Great House, built by Ancestral Puebloan people between roughly 1200 and 1300 CE. The monument was established in 1923 by President Warren G. Harding and now protects around 800 acres of canyon-rim country. Holly sits about four miles east of the Square Tower visitor area by trail; the BLM access road is rough and seasonal.
The Holly Tower is the signature structure: a roughly three-story masonry tower built directly on top of a free-standing boulder, with no obvious way up that is still intact. Ancestral Puebloan masons across Hovenweep favoured cliff edges, canyon heads, and boulder tops, and the towers may have served as granaries, lookouts, and ceremonial spaces, or all three at different times. The walls are double-coursed sandstone, set with a clay-and-mud mortar that has weathered through more than seven centuries of high-desert wind. Archaeologists at the National Park Service date the masonry to the late Pueblo II and Pueblo III periods, the same century that produced the larger sites at Mesa Verde, fifty miles east.
Access to Holly is the slowest part of the visit. Two routes lead in: a roughly eight-mile round-trip hike from the Square Tower visitor area along the Holly Canyon trail, or a high-clearance four-wheel-drive approach on BLM Road 4531, which the Park Service describes as rough and impassable when wet. The visitor center is open daily; the back-country roads close in mud and snow. Day-use entry is covered by the standard National Park Service pass, and there is no fee station at Holly itself. The closest gateway towns are Cortez, Colorado, about forty-five miles southeast, and Blanding, Utah, to the west. There is no water and no cell coverage on the trail.