Friday, July 1, 2016

No-Name Woodlands, Ontario

gated, locked, and posted
2,528 miles

Along this stretch of Highway 17, the Trans-Canada Highway, I found no place names, no nearby landmarks, no crossroads.  I saw a few farmhouses.  I saw many gated entrances to dirt roads, and I wondered whether they were very private homes or cabins or undeveloped land that is reserved for hunting.  The aerial view does not provide much information about the lands behind the gates.

The most intriguing features around here are the short gravel roads to nowhere.  They seem to cross the highway’s drainage ditch and then stop.


road construction east of Corbeil, ON
I thought I was pretty clever to deduce that they were staging areas for highway construction, such as what I saw on Google back in Corbeil.  
I wonder: do many stretches of highway contain these?  Maybe only in such a featureless stretch are they so noticeable.


Tractor needs a causeway.
The most practical reason for these short little roadlets would be for tractor access to the fields across the drainage ditch.  That’s what I’m going to believe, unless I hear from a more knowledgeable reader.


images:  Google Images & Google Street Views

1 comment:

  1. How fascinating that in sparsely populated Saskatchewan one can find a place name of some sort pretty reliably, but in Ontario there is a nameless spot. I guess we tend to think of Ontario as highly urbanized, though that applies but to a small portion of the territory. - Gary D. Cannon

    ReplyDelete