gleeb visits Toronto: standing on Scotland

Scotland used to be part of North America – a continent called Laurentia. The opening of the northeastern Atlantic Ocean around 55 million years ago sundered Scotland from its homeland and left it attached to Albion, the isle of Britain. In Toronto, I was hoping to visit the homeland of Scotland by looking at the Canadian Shield, the 'original' landmass that was the core of Laurentia.
What I found was different!

When I first learned about the far northwestern Scottish rocks called the Lewisian metamorphic rocks, I was fascinated that they were 2 billion years old. I wanted to go walk on them. Later I visited the Royal Gorge in Colorado, which cuts deep into the Earth's crust, and I discovered that the rocks at the bottom of Royal Gorge were also about 2 billion years old. So, maybe also would be the Canadian Shield.

Walking on Canadian Shield rocks in
Village of Yorkville Park, Toronto

The name Canadian Shield comes from the flat roundish shape of the metamorphic rocks that form a craton, a continental nucleus that has existed since the Precambrian (before 542 million years ago). So in the Village of Yorkville Park in Toronto, they have established an artwork that recreates the feeling of the Canadian Shield. Segments of metamorphic rocks from the craton have been concreted together in a shield shape. These particular rocks may not be 2 billion years old, but you can get the feeling of walking on an ancient landscape here in the middle of the city. Find them just north of the busy Bloor upmarket shopping street on Cumberland, across from Old York Lane.

Sadly, the closest relatives of Lewisian Scotland lie not on the Canadian continent but on Greenland. So I did not fulfill my wish of standing on Scotland in Toronto. But thinking about the landscape in broad swathes certainly does give one a different perspective on a visit to a new country.