Here’s a nice travel piece about Cape Breton. The writer describes it as
…a place where impenetrably forested mountains plunge straight to the sea, their descent interrupted only by the frail ribbon of the Cabot Trail; and where the vast saltwater sprawl of Bras d’Or Lake convolutes nearly every route between one place and another. Its rocky little Canso Causeway, a scant half-century old, is its only link to a province so tenuously peninsular that it is almost itself an island.
I like this too, a bit on the Scot’s chronic longing for home, even when we are home:
Nothing is as sad as a sad fiddle tune from the Gaelic-speaking world. These aren’t songs about lost loves, but about a lost land. “A lot of the traditional songs date back to the early settlers,” I was told by Katie MacLeod, a seventeen-year-old fiddler from Inverness, just up the coast from Mabou. “They’re sad songs, because they were people who missed their homeland.” Katie, who began playing on a child-sized fiddle when she was four, well understands the pull of home even if sadness seems a stranger to her cheerful demeanor. She lives in a house that has been in her family for 140 years, and says of her generation that “a lot of young people leave — but they come back if they get a chance.”
You can read the full article here.
Tagged: Cape Breton, Gaelic, links, travel