Wednesday, March 14, 2012

The Scarborough Bluffs Looking Like They Belong In A John Ford Film

I can't seem to find any information about this photo online — like, say, when it was taken — but I like it so I'm posting it anyway. It almost looks like a shot of Monument Valley, where John Ford shot his iconic Westerns, but this is, of course, our very own Scarborough Bluffs. They were apparently originally formed thousands of years ago as part the shoreline of the ancient Lake Iroquois, the giant lake left behind when the last Ice Age ended and the enormofuckingus glacier that used to cover this land melted away. (The big hill that runs through Toronto just north of Davenport Road was also part of that shoreline.) The cliffs been gradually moving north as they erode away, and the sand that gets washed off them is what formed the Toronto Islands (which were nothing more than a sandy peninsula when our city was founded — before they got separated from the mainland by a storm and then enlarged artificially).

There are some cliffs that look a little like this on the northeast coast of England, at Scarborough, which is why Elizabeth Simcoe,  the wife of the guy who founded Toronto, named our cliffs Scarborough, too. The name obviously stuck. And ended up being used not just for the Bluffs, but for the entire east-end suburb that was eventually swallowed up by the Megacity.

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