This text is part of the special book Plaisirs
Cabot Trail, or Cabot Trail, is one of the most beautiful scenic drives in the world, but it also offers an incursion into Scottish and Acadian cultures on Canadian soil. Guided tour of the star Cape Breton Island Road.
Regularly ranked at the top of the list of the most admirable panoramic roads on the planet, this delightful 298 km ribbon of asphalt majestically encircles the northern part of this mountainous island. Marrying here the grandiose cliffs, running there in a green valley, always defying the heights, the Cabot Trail goes from a hamlet with a Gaelic name to an Acadian fishing village, from a table overflowing with plump lobsters to a pub where Celtic music resounds.
When you arrive by route 19, the route begins in Margaree Forks, about fifty kilometers after the Glenora distillery – where they concoct the oldest single malt whiskey in North America.
Very quickly, the toponymy leaves no doubt as to the origin of the communities that inhabit part of the island: Belle-Côte, Terre Noire and Cap Le Moine form as many villages founded by Acadians, before their deportation in 1755.
French village
It is a little further that is Chéticamp, standard bearer of the people of the Great Upheaval in Nova Scotia, as its Acadian museum reminds us. Of its 3,000 inhabitants, more than half still honor French as their mother tongue. And every winter, we still celebrate Mi-Carême, an old popular French festival where the masked population goes from house to house to feast, fiddle and jig.
The small village of colorful cottages also marks the start of Nova Scotia’s highest peaks and the entry point to Cape Breton Highlands National Park. Like a slice of prettiness cut from one end of the island to the other, this one passes through threadbare rocks and faded lichens from the Coastal Trail to the stunning panoramas of the Franey Trailwhich dominates the Atlantic, and those of the Skyline Trailwhich allows you to get close to the horizon and rise in all majesty above the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
In Pleasant Bay — great stop for a lobster roll at the Rusty Anchor — the Cabot Trail leaves the Acadian country, skirts the limits of the national park and begins to smell like Scotland. At Cape North, a detour due north soon leads to Bay St. Lawrence (Bàgh Labhruinn, in Gaelic), a marinaded village with all-wooden shacks clad near steep cliffs, and especially to Meat Cove (Còbn na Feòla), the northernmost end of Cape Breton. From here, you can guess the real Highlands, on the other side of the Great Pool, through the gaps of fog and beyond the raging waves.
Along the way, we cross the immense sandy beach of Cabot’s Landing Provincial Park, where the Venetian explorer Giovanni Caboto is said to have landed in 1497. On site, a faded bust and a plaque recall the arrival of the man who “discovered the continent American in 1497 » [sic].
Back on the Cabot Trial
You can turn east again to fill up on salt spray by taking White Point Road, which skirts the bucolic Aspy Bay and its lobster boats bobbing against the backdrop of lovely massifs. Very quickly, we reconnect with the Cape Breton Highlands National Park, whose relief gradually sinks to Ingonish Beach, not far from the Highland Links — one of the most famous golf courses. in the world — and the Keltic Lodge, a splendid hotel with a prized table. An hour’s drive away, the small museum of the Gaelic College of St. Ann’s retraces the history of the Scottish colonization of the island.
The official starting (or ending) point of the Cabot Trail, Baddeck sits elegantly on the shores of vast Bras d’Or Lake, where Scotsman Alexander Graham Bell decided to settle in 1886. The historic site dedicated to him reminds us that beyond the telephone, this prolific inventor was also a pioneer of Canadian aviation.
From Baddeck, we now have the choice between going up north-west to complete the loop of the Cabot Trailbegin the tour of Lac Bras D’or by its panoramic route or descend towards the Fleur-de-Lis Trail and Île Madame, in the land of the Acadians and the Micmacs.
But first of all, it is advisable to give news to the family by phoning home. What better place in the world to make a phone call than the city where the inventor of the telephone lived and ended his days?
Our collaborator was the guest of Tourism Nova Scotia and Flair Airlines.