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| Trail Map |
The rugged landscape of Cupids that you see today is ancient. It was shaped by the erosive action of glacial ice sheets as they moved across the Avalon peninsula for hundreds of thousands of years—during the Pleistocene glaciation between 2.5 million and 12,000 years ago. It is the most recent glacial period experienced in this region.
At the beginning of the Burnt Head Trail, just as you leave behind the fencing around the old Anglican cemetery, you will walk across a wide area of 575 million year old dark grey bedrock of the Drook Formation — it is the foundation of the Burnt Head area. The smooth surface is the result of thousands of years of grinding and polishing by the Pleistocene ice sheets.
Look closely and you can see dozens of parallel scratches and grooves on the smooth surface of the rock. These were gouged by pebbles and gravel as they were dragged over the rock, trapped under enormous pressure beneath thick glacial ice. The scratches here were probably made at the very end of the glaciation, between 10,000 and 20,000 years ago.
These etchings can tell us a little bit about how the glaciers moved. Their orientation lets us know that the glaciers were moving to the northeast, toward Conception Bay. There, far beyond the modern shoreline of Burnt Head Point, the ice sheets calved icebergs into the North Atlantic, much like Greenland glaciers do today. This area of glacially smoothed bedrock was known as "Bald Rock" by local residents because little grass would grow here.
Other areas of exposed bedrock can be found along the trail. One such area — between houses in Noder Cove — was used as a cart path because of its natural smoothness. It was even kept washed clean by the women of the community.¹
¹ Renelle Bishop, "The Abandoned Communities: Greenland, Noder Cove and Deep Gulch," August 6, 2000, Cupids Historical Society, Cupids Legacy Centre.