Originally Posted by
Tiana
Excellent question!
Depends on the land's origins. For example, right now, I live in Winnipeg. Winnipeg is in the centre of the Red River Valley, which is where Lake Agazziz used to be. The land was formed by a glacier scraping down the land then melting, and eventually vanishing, leaving us in a primarily flat terrain. The glacier would have also left massive deposits of minerals healthy for plant growing, so you'll observe this entire region is great for farming now that it's been drained. Because it's so low, before there were people, there were a lot more little rivers and creeks twisting throughout the area, and this caused massive flood risks, so many of these little rivers and creeks were diverted, or built over, moved into culverts, filled in, etc. So all of the hills in my city are representative of the old creekbeds and the former movement of the river before it was properly curtailed by civilization.
I used to live in rural Alberta, which is in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains, in its rain shadow. It's more arid there, and little rolling hills literally cover the landscape, becoming more and more severe as you approach the mountains. Not all of the land is good for farming so you'll just see them covered in grasslands and cows. In this case, the hills are shaped by the needs of the farmers, and the drying and deepening of the water routes, or depletion on use for watering livestock and crops, leaving hills where there used to be ponds and creeks.
If you keep going east from me now, you'll hit the Canadian Shield, which is a very rocky, hilly area shaped by the underlying bedrock, and not worth growing anything on at all. Roads had to be cut through the rock otherwise it's very nearly impassible and inhabitable. Everything just becomes hilly and severe in a 5 minute span of time as you drive from Winnipeg towards Kenora, and maintains that inhospitable terrain through Northern Ontario where presumably on the other side, there's a similar dropoff where it becomes plains land again. In this case, the hills are shaped by underlying bedrock preventing something like a glacier from sweeping over it and smoothing it over.
One more hill of note is the artificial hill. This can be for waste disposal (in rural Alberta there was "Tire Hill" which was legendarily backfilled with tires, in Winnipeg there is "Garbage Hill" which, well, should be obvious too) and it could be for ritual, remains of mounds from previous civilizations. In England, for example, there's one hill that was legendarily made by people walking up the hill to drop a bucket of dirt on top as a physical storytelling mechanism. There are other hills that are old mounds from campsites from Roman time, hills that were formed from trenches from battlegrounds being rained on for centuries, hills formed by ditches dug by farmers of long past, hills from large structures with a dugout foundation which have long eroded but shaped the land. There are hills made because armies got bored (see the Netherlands Pyramid!). Hills full of dead bodies, because they were shoveled into massive graves and covered over with dirt and sod. Hills full of ruined "temples" which have been obviously backfilled intentionally and not by mudslide (see Gobekli Tepi). Hills formed because of an actual mudslide or a volcanic eruption or a buildup of the dirt and gravel content from shovelling snow into the same spot year after year, the water melting away, the residue left behind. Or people walking the same path, wearing part of it down, and thus encouraging the water to repeatedly flow down that way, slowly beating a ripple into the land.
Technically, every single hill is a mound of fine corpse powder (dirt), always rocks or remains of some kind, and how it got that way is up to you as a world builder. Consider the rainfall. Consider what would happen if that region got a good solid shake. Consider what the wind is doing. If there's not a lot of roots to hold dirt in place, good topsoil will get stripped away–this problem happened in Saskatchewan, where trees are quite sparse in places due to harvesting for building materials. People had to go and intentionally plant windbreaks and sections of trees again to hold the earth in place, otherwise the wind would make it very challenging to farm. For a visual of what the land looks like with no roots and rock to hold it in place, well, imagine a desert. The wind shapes the sand until it hits something geographically that stops it.
Consider what people have been doing with their trash and their dead. Another thing to consider is mining operations, because this will result in a very specific sort of hill left behind that might have many layers from pulling up different layers of strata and piling it in the same spot with a machine.
All of these things feed into the formation of hills, something most people probably don't even think about is why and how the land they're walking on was landscaped. I recommend taking inspiration from the world around you, as I have, by looking into the history of your country's geography.
Hills are often neglected in favor of cooler elements, like mountainous regions. However, they can contain an enormous berth of world history if you actually contemplate why they're positioned where they are in your world. So I recommend pondering your hills a bit both in the perspective of the geographic plates and the cultural history of the land. It's a combination of the two.
How do you place realistic hills? Where geographically should they form?
Reply With Quote
