Badlands” is a geologic term for an area of soft rock devoid of vegetation and soil cover that has become molded into a rolling landscape of rounded hills and gullies. Such areas are rare in Ontario and this is one of the best examples. They exhibit the reddish hue of the Queenston Shale that forms them; the iron oxide in the shale produces this colour. The narrow greenish bands that can be seen throughout the shale are due to the change of red iron oxide to green iron oxide brought on by the circulating groundwater. The relatively soft shale is essentially clay and is easily eroded by water. This site was acquired by the Ontario Heritage Foundation in 2000 and is under the care of the Bruce Trail Association.
The Cheltenham Badlands is one of the best examples of badland topography in
Ontario, making it an Area of Natural and Scientific Interest (ANSI). Around the
turn of the century, land clearing and livestock grazing caused the erosion of
the underlying red shale, leaving a hummocky network of exposed trenched gullies
on the lower slopes of the Niagara Escarpment.
