drumlin /DRUM-lin/ noun. A ridge, or a low hill, often oval (think of a half-buried egg), formed by—and in the direction of—glacial movement. Originally applied to landforms in Ireland and Scotland, such as Dromore (Droim Mór, or Large Ridge) and Drumoak (Druim M’Aodhaig, or the ridge of St Aodhag). From the Irish & Scottish Gaelic druim (a ridge or the back of a person or animal), from Old Irish druimm (same meaning), origins unknown.
See also: arête, escarpment, esker, sastruga, yardang, hummock and the evocative “hog’s back.”
Before delving into some examples of drumlin in use by some of our greatest (and not-so-great) wordsmiths, let me draw your attention to this little tidbit:
In Walden, Thoreau writes:
"“I caught a glimpse of a woodchuck stealing across my path, and felt a strange thrill of savage delight, and was strongly tempted to seize and devour him raw; not that I was hungry then, except for that wildness which he represented… I found in myself, and still find, an instinct toward a higher, or, as it is named, spiritual life, as do most men, and another toward a primitive rank and savage one, and I reverence them both. I love the wild not less than the good.”
To which Robert Frost responds, in his poem “The Drumlin Woodchuck,” with what I think must be a pun (a belief further reinforced by learning recently that Northeasterners indeed pronounce “Thoreau” the way most of us pronounce “thorough”):
It will be because, though small
As measured against the All,
I have been so instinctively thorough
About my crevice and burrow.
Oh, and to the meta-literary use of “drumlin” I must also add Mark Harris’ snippy, unhappy biography of the evasive and irascible Saul Bellow, Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck…
More Examples
“Like the huge red jasper boulders and the tiny flecks of gold, Indiana’s diamonds are glacial erratics. They were transported from Canada, and by reading the fabric of the till and taking bearings from striations and grooves in the underlying rock—and by noting the compass orientation of drumlin hills, which look like sculptured whales and face in the direction from which their maker came—anybody can plainly see that the direction from which the ice arrived…” (John McPhee, Annals of the Former World)
“I left my betters the task of analyzing glacial drifts, drumlins, and gremlins, and kremlins…” (Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)
“Her face is seamed with a million wrinkles like the map of a state where the geography hasn’t settled down—rivers and canyons along her brown leather cheeks, ridges below the knob of her chin, the sinuous raised drumlin of bone at the base of her forehead, the caves of her eyes.” (Stephen King, The Stand)
“Every foot of the landscape from here on north would be scored and scarred with reminders of glaciation—scattered boulders called erratics, drumlins, eskers, high tarns, cirques. I was entering a new world.” (Bill Bryson, A Walk in the Woods)
“On Arran, he showed us rocks folded like toffee, ribboned and split; on Staffa, the even, keyboard-regular columns of cooled lava; in Edinburgh, the rubble-tailed stumps of ancient volcanoes; in Glasgow, the black, petrified remains of trees three hundred million years old; in Lochaber, the parallel roads that marked the shores of lochs dammed and un-dammed by glaciers, millennia earlier; throughout Scotland we saw hanging valleys, drumlins and corries; and in the Hebrides we walked the raised beaches where the ocean swells had crashed until the land rose, and touched rocks two and a half billion years old; half as old as Earth itself; a sixth of the age of the entire universe. Here was magic…” (Iain Banks, The Crow Road)
“Old photographs of this region showed clean curves of land, stripped for firewood and cropped by sheep, and a view clear across low drumlins to the sea.” (John Updike)
“‘… it’s resulted in a massive backlog. As you can see – ’ I waved at the drumlins of paper around us. ‘We’ve had a lot of submissions…’” (Kevin Smith)
“Not just the simple turn of a season: more roll now, more tangled range, drumlins and pitches, rifts and concealed copses disturbing the perfect expanse of agribiz, surprise features where Weber had seen only the peak of emptiness. He’d missed everything, the first time through.” (Richard Powers)
“And for three days they were in the Mendican Foothills, rock tors and drumlins flecked with trees. They walked the routes of long-gone glaciers.” (China Miéville)
“She trudged along until she came on a little drumlin ridge, with its steep side clear of snow. She could traverse along the bare rock without leaving tracks. She did so until she got tired. It was really cold out, the snow falling straight down in tiny flakes, probably accreted around sand grains. At the end of the drumlin was a fat low boulder. She sat in its lee. She turned off her walker’s heating unit, and covered the blinking alarm light on her wristpad with a clump of snow.” (Kim Stanley Robinson)
“The Necropolis. Though conceived as a tribute to the city’s esteemed dead, it had, by that time, less than half a century after its inauguration, fallen into neglect; its grounds were strewn with empty liquor bottles and encroached upon by slum dwellings, its monuments were graffiti-scarred; it had, in ignorance, been laid out on a cankered drumlin, in darker times the site of a fane consecrated to dire rites, was blighted.” (Timothy J. Jarvis)
“He thought about the Celtic imagination as ‘an untilled field’ and spoke of the ‘unmuddied stream of art in Ireland’. The particular character of light falling on a drumlin in a certain corner of Ireland, in other words, had not already been annexed by Monet or Cézanne.” (Laurence Scott)
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