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Simcoe Lowlands / Carden Plain / Peterborough Drumlin Field / Eskers / Drumlins / Map Pictures
The Simcoe Lowlands border Georgian Bay and Lake Simcoe. They naturally fall into two major divisions seperated by the uplands of Simcoe county. The eastern portion is known as the Simcoe basin, covered mostly by Lake Simcoe itself. The old Thorah township is found on this basin. A wet sand plain makes up a good deal of the eastern portion, with several tracts of nearly bare limestone. Along the Beaver river and north of Beaver better silt is found. The eastern shore of Lake Simcoe has fewer sandy beaches, but summer cottagers still migrate to the Port Bolster area up to Atherley. The Lake Simcoe basin, on a whole, is a poor farming district, with extensive areas of bogs and wet sand.
Between the Kawarthas and Lake Couchiching lay an area of 225 square miles of a limestone plain, named after the township of Carden, found in the central region of this plain. This area was a considerable settlement during the lumber era. This bare land turned into farmland probably without intention. More than 60 per cent of the land occupied was accounted as rough pasture and 25 per cent was reported as woodland. This area is used mainly for grazing beef cattle. With a decline in farm population, this area should no longer be regarded as agricultural and would seem reasonable to reforest many sections of the Carden Plain.
For the most part this region is under laid with Trenton limestone (a somewhat softer and less massive formation then Black River limestone). It is also highly fossiliferous and easily disintegrated. The general orientation of the drumlin axes occupying the Peterborough field are from north east to south west. The drumlins here are mainly composed of highly calcareous till but there are local differences; as in toward the south, along the border of the interlobate area and in the western part of the field, the till is some what more sandy.
The Peterborough drumlin field is also notable for its eskers as well as its drumlins. A good example is the Cannington esker. The Cannington esker is a rather narrow and crooked gravel ridge which crosses the highway just west of Cannington, ending in a large kame from which most of the gravel is removed. Between Cannington and Manilla the county line crosses a much larger esker which is 60 feet tall in some places and is two miles in length.
They are narrow, winding, steep sided ridge, with an appearance of a railroad embankment. These ridges were formed by deposits on the beds of streams that flowed in tunnels near the edge of the ice sheet. They contain sand and gravel making excellent resources of material for construction purposes.
They are a common form of deposition of continental ice sheets. They are long, stream-lined, oval-shaped hills made of till. Drumlin is a Celtic word meaning ‘little hill’. They sometimes occur singly, but are found most commonly in groups, in a uniform axis parallel to the direction of the ice movement.
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Page By:
Dan Risebrough
Royaloak Studio
