r/Milton • u/No_Gene_895 • 13h ago
Photo TIL the rolling hills behind the Milton Hospital are actually massive Ice Age remnants
Edit: based on feedback in the comments I may be wrong about these hills being drumlins, as google Streetview from about 15 years ago show this area being flatter. If we have any experts in this field who can shed some light, would be good to learn where the drumlins actually are.
Hey everyone,
I was walking around the green space behind the Milton District Hospital the other day, and I got curious about those massive, smooth rolling hills back there. I always assumed they were just dirt piles left over from developers or deliberate park landscaping.
Turns out, they are thousands of years old and have a pretty wild history!
I did a bit of digging, and those mounds are actually drumlins—which are physical footprints left behind by the Laurentide Ice Sheet during the last Ice Age, roughly 13,000 to 15,000 years ago.
A few cool facts if you're a geography nerd or just like local trivia:
How they formed: Imagine a two-kilometer-thick sheet of ice moving across Ontario like giant sandpaper. It crushed up rocks, gravel, and clay, and the intense weight naturally sculpted the debris into these smooth, streamlined, egg-shaped hills.
The "Basket of Eggs": Geologists literally call this specific layout a "basket of eggs" topography. Because the glaciers shaped them, they all run parallel. The steeper, blunt side points northeast (where the glacier came from), and the gentle tail points southwest (where it was moving).
Why they are still here: Early settlers found them incredibly hard to plow because the dirt inside them (glacial till) is packed tight with heavy stones and dense clay. So, they were mostly left alone as pastures.
The view: Because they give you a bit of elevation, if you stand on top of them on a clear day, you get a completely uninterrupted view of the Niagara Escarpment to the west.
Pretty cool piece of Milton (pre)history!