Nova Scotia: Cape Breton Island, Cape Breton Highlands National Park

Cabot Trail, Highland Village, Fortress Louisbourg National Historic Site

The following piece was published on “Old Ones Dream” June 6, 2013, and contributed to the book “Magnolia Elegy: Place In the Edisto Fork” published April 14, 2022.

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While on Cape Breton in the summer of 2012, our primary base of operations was at a lake front campground just south of Baddeck. We spent all of our nights there except for one very pleasant week camping at Cape Breton Highlands National Park just north of Cheticamp.

While at Baddeck we concentrated on history and local music. At Iona the Highland Village site is a very well done reenactment of the Scottish Gael migration to “Nova Scotia”. The several hours we spent walking this site and listening to the script of the re-enactors (in Gaelic if requested) was a great introduction to the Gaelic part of Nova Scotia heritage.

We also spent a day touring Fortress Louisbourg National Historic Site which is a huge reconstruction and reenactment site that deals with the early French presence in the Maritime Provinces. The French call Nova Scotia “L’Acadie”. There are many regions with a dominant Acadian French presence in Nova Scotia, such as St. Mary’s Bay, Chezzetcook, and the coast of Cape Breton Island around Cheticamp.

We attended our first Ceilidh at The Baddeck Gathering. Jennifer Bowman was on the upright piano accompanying fiddler Donna Marie DeWolfe (and serving as musicologist for the tourists in the crowd). Donna Marie took up the fiddle 7 years before (at the age of 10) and she can play. She has a wonderful sound and is very athletic - the heel and toe slapping of her leather sandals amount to a four piece rhythm section. Our introduction to local music in Nova Scotia had come earlier at a restaurant in 5 Islands during the weekend of the Not Since Moses Run. There we heard the Halifax bar band “Celtic Rant”. We took notice that, in comparison to our southern appalachian Scotts-Irish music, they had added the keyboard to the fiddle, pipes, mandolin, guitar and there was no banjo. We learned some great local favorite bar songs (”The Queen of Old Argyle”) and a wonderful Irish closing time benediction “The Parting Glass” from the 1600s.

After a few days, we left Baddeck and moved over to camp for a week in the Cape Breton Highlands National Park. The campground there is one of the most pleasant and well managed that we used on the two month trip, and the Cape Breton Highlands Park, the Cabot Trail highway, and the hiking trails in that area are magnificent.

From the Skyline Trail above the Gulf of St Lawrence with Cheticamp Island on the horizon

We hiked the Skyline Trail soon after our arrival. The trail is a 5.7 mile loop out to a headland cliff over 1000 feet above the sea. Back in Cheticamp that night, we walked into The Doryman Pub and there was Donna Marie DeWolfe again. We had a strong hunch that a couple in the room happened to be her parents so we introduced ourselves. They were driving her around to performances several nights a week that summer and we visited with them that night. They are nice folks and very proud parents. When we saw Donna Marie again at a concert at the Judique Music Center, her mother exclaimed “Donna Marie is following you around”. We said we were Donna Marie groupies.

The following day we hiked out of the campground through an Acadian forest up the Salmon Pools Trail which is 7.6 miles round trip. Following are photos of T and the pools in the Cheticamp River canyon.

While at Cape Breton Highlands NP we hiked Skyline Trail, Salmon Pools, Le Chemin du Buttereau, Le Buttereau, Corney Brook and the Acadian Trail over 4 days for a total of 28 miles of gorgeous scenery. We took one day to drive the Cabot Trail around as far as Ingonish for lunch. We took a very long side trip (about 30 miles of not so good road) from Cape North up to Meat Cove, where we had intended to have lunch, but there were no services, not even a vending machine. There are campsites and cabins to rent.

Meat Cove, the northern most settlement in Nova Scotia, looking north across Cabot Strait

On the Cabot Trail north of Ingonish

On the Cabot Trail north of Ingonish

Enragée Point Light, Cape Enragée, Cheticamp Island

Cheticamp village from the Island

A fairly typical Cape Breton household woodpile at Cheticamp

We stayed a week at the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, and Cheticamp provided very good support services, even an excellent health food store (Trofle) with grass fed meats, etc. We left Cheticamp and returned to the campground at Baddeck to prepare for our crossing to Newfoundland.