Walkers along the cutting today, wherever they can circumvent the
fencing which federal railway legislation requires the CNR to maintain
(and, incidentally, us to respect) can be grateful to the railway planners
of 70 years ago who Inadvertently preserved for us a slim slice of an
earlier, almost rural Halifax. If it were not for the cutting, the area
would be entirely private residential property, every trace of native
vegetation and earlier ways of life vanished.
Thanks to the railway we can still walk through a little of Marlborough
Woods. Around the turn of the century groups of children roared these
lovely woods playing at Robin Hood, signalling each other with secret bird
calls which later, on First World War battlefields, enabled Haligonians to
locate each other.
Progressing wherever the railway's steel fencing has been breached, we
can follow a narrow footpath and find occasionally some flower or shrub to
remind us of the stately gardens of yesteryear. Could the Manitoba Maple
between Oakland and South Street be a survivor from the magnificent gardens
maintained at "Oaklands" by Samuel Cunard, second son of Sir William Cunard
?
Nearing Coburg Road, where summer guests used to stroll in the grounds
of Birchdale on the Arm, we can perhaps see with our imagination, if not
with our eyes, the handsome grove of Acacia trees once surrounding Acacia
Cottage, which was moved to South Street at the foot of Henry Street in the
1950's .
Here and there we will notice the thin, stony soil with its crop
of poverty grass and rosy lichen give way to a stretch of rich, deep garden
soil and know that here a good gardener. once worked. According to the
season we may meet in these stretches the delightful surprise of such
'garden escapes' as crocuses, grape hyacinth, daffodils, lily-of-the-valley, sweet cecily, day lilies, or pansies. Here and there a lilac shrub
or horse-chestnut tree appears among the prevailing Indian pear. Near
Jubilee Road we cross the old Pryor estate where visitors enjoyed the sunny
blue of forget-me-nots stretching for hundreds of yards along the path, and
perhaps it is their descendants we now see in patches of bright blue along
the way in high summer.
Above Quinpool Road we find English Oak and further along, are
surprised by typical bog plants growing in the marsh area caused by
diversions of drainage from the railway.
Among the raspberry and blackberry bushes which rim both sides of
the cutting for long stretches, we may here and there find a bush with
unusually large berries and wonder if its ancestors were once a gardener's
pride and joy. However that may be, the berries provide many a jar of jam
or jelly in Halifax homes every year. In how many major cities may one
have the pleasure of going berry-picking in the fall ?
Time has softened the outlines of the scar made by dynamite and
steam shovel across Halifax's loveliest neighbourhood. And the railroad has
preserved for us the chance to step back in time and wander through
surviving traces of wilderness, interspersed with evidences of the work of
people devoted to the creation of their personal vision of beauty.
Geology
The railway runs through the south end of Halifax in a cutting in slate of
the Halifax Formation This is an ancient, metamorphosed sedimentary rock of
Cambrian-Ordovician age (c.500 million years ago) and owes Its origin to
silt and clay eroded from a long-vanished mountain chain which must have
been situated somewhere around where present-day Morocco now lies. This is
not as may initially seem since the Atlantic Ocean did not exist in those
times. The suspended matter from rivers settled out on the seabed in neat
horizontal layers, but during Devonian times (400 m.y.ago)there was a very
active period of mountain building and the layers were folded and heated.
This event almost obliterated the original bedding planes (they can just be
detected), superimposing a completely different set of fracture planes and
considerably toughening the rock by recrystallisation. Some of the heat and
pressure for this probably came from the intrusion which formed the granite
on the other side of the Northwest Arm. If you examine this granite you
will see occasional lumps of Halifax slate which were mixed into it while
it was still in a mushy state. Thus the granite came after the slate.
Turning now to relatively recent happenings, the Ice Age, which began
maybe as much as two million years ago, is the event which literally
shaped modern Nova Scotia. The Ice Age consisted of several glacial
episodes interrupted by warm periods. The latest cold spell ended about
9000 years ago with the last ice melting from Nova Scotia on the
Cumberland Mountains and Cape Breton Highlands. As everyone now should
know, it is only a matter of time until the next cold spell starts.
During glacial events the ice sheets moved out from their centres of
formation carrying rocks and clay picked up as they formed. The effect of
these sheets moving across the landscape was to act as a gigantic rasp,
smoothing off the landscape and wearing away the rock. Maybe 500 m. of
rock was removed in places.
The ice sheets eroded away soft and broken rocks more easily than
harder unbroken rock. Halifax Harbour and the Northwest Arm were ground
out by the ice sheets, probably along fault lines. Thus Halifax
Peninsula, as a suitable deepwater port for military and commercial use,
is the result of the Ice Age. When the ice cap melted, the smoothed-off
rock surface, the so-called glacial pavement, was left exposed or covered
with clay and broken rock. Where the latter was the case, the scratches
on the rock surface were preserved from weathering and can be seen when
the glacial till is removed. This can be seen along a section of the
cutting between Oakland Road and Regina Terrace.
Habitats
The habitats which existed along the route before the railway was
built can be deduced from a study of historic records and the existing
vegetation. Basically the species composition of the vegetation is
conservative, changes occur in a predictable way, and by knowing what is
there at present, a backward extrapolation in time can be made to
reconstruct the former vegetation.
Some plants, for example Indian Pear and Pin Cherry, are pioneer
species and will establish in fields. Thus a strong growth of these
implies a former state of rough ground or pasture. Other plants are
conservative and are unable to move much from their aboriginal sites.
Examples of the latter are the grass Oryzopsis asperifolia , indian pipe,
the moccasin-flower and the spotted coral root. Where the 1atter are
found you can be pretty sure that the vegetation has had only relatively
gentle modification from its original state. With this type of knowledge
we can walk along the margin of the railway and put together a picture of
how the human use of the land has varied from place to place.
Extracted from "South End Railway Cutting: Report No. 2 of the Area Studies Groups", Pierre Taschereau, Halifax Field Naturalists News, No. 27, Spring 1982.
