Draw a line from Andy Haydon Park on the Ottawa River, south to Brockville on the St. Lawrence, and pretty much all of Ontario east thereof sits on sedimentary bedrock, much of it limestone. Kingston may style itself the "Limestone City"*, but Ottawa is no slouch when it comes to great massive hunks of calcium carbonate** rock sticking out of the ground. From the city core westward, Parliament Hill, Nanny Goat and Cathedral Hills, the Chaudiere and Lemieux island groups (the latter with its associated Squaw Bay on the Quebec side and Lazy Bay here in Ontario, all offer spectacular views of great grey cliffs and stony outcrops. Lebreton Flats is itself a great limestone plain.
For sheer unrelieved scale however, the great limestone mass just east of Vanier is the real jawdropper — and maybe "east of Vanier" is cutting things close. Consider this top map detail from 1906. Elevations are in feet above sea level, click on the map to view full size.
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| (adapted from) Department of Militia and Defense - 1906 |
Notice Beechwood and Notre Dame Cemeteries to the lower left. Both are bounded on the east by St. Laurent Bouldevard — but what's with the the kinky bit jutting into Notre Dame? Long before St. Laurent was a boulevard it was a dirt track laid down to follow a 19th century surveyors base-line. Except that dirt track had to make a detour around a hill of rock. That hill was the western end of the the limestone behemoth*** that dominates this map. A straight and proper roadbed wasn't cut through the rock until the 1950s, when the development of Manor Park, Rockcliffe Air Base and Rockledge Terrace made the kinky little road look inadequate and out of date.
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| 1965 — Quarry, St. Laurent at Brittany Dr., with two new apartment towers, path of old road still visible |
You can see a little quarry at the north end of the kink. It has since been filled with apartment towers. If you track to the right, you'll soon arrive at another road. Only the south end of Lang's Road remains today. It too sports a little kink, skirting another limestone outcrop. That's what you get for putting roads on property lines. It's not marked on this map, but Lang's Quarry, just north of Montreal Road, still sits within that crook and is worth a visit.
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| 2011 — Lang's Quarry, Road, curve crowding Montfort Hospital parking |
Up we climb, along Montreal Road to Carson's Road and the aptly named Quarries neighbourhood. Just look at all the quarries, again, now filled in, their former site marked by row-houses and apartment towers. Back in the 1800s, this settlement was called Rock Village. Can you guess what people did for a living there?
Eastward ho, past Skead Road (now Blair) we climb some more, hitting an elevation just over 350 feet (about 107 metres). A small quarry was dug here some time after 1928, on the "first level" of Rothwell Heights. It's now a park, "Quarry Park", encircled by Davidson Crescent.
From this point onward, Montreal Road dips downward to Green's Creek on the right side of the map. It does climb again on the other side, toward Blackburn Hamlet and Orleans— but I think that's enough limestone for one day.
*Anyways, Kingston is
west of Brockville, so why am I even mentioning it?
** Limestone has to be at least 50% CaCO3 or else they call it something else. Hey, you've gotta draw the line somewhere.
*** Somehow this elongated mass reminds me of Anne Elk (Miss) and her theory.
You know the one.
aerial imagery via geoOttawa
