Beauty is clearly in the eye of the beholder, but there is wide agreement that Cape Breton Island is one of the world’s most beautiful places: “[n]atural beauty and cultural integrity earned Canada’s Cape Breton Island in Nova Scotia second place on the scorecard”^[1] published in the March 2004 issue of National Geographic Traveler, coming behind only the Norwegian fjords and tying with New Zealand’s South Island and Chile’s Torres del Paine.

The photos in this essay were all taken on my recent trip to Cape Breton Island and were selected to show some of the diverse kinds of beauty found there. My trip was mostly spent along the western coast of Inverness County from Chéticamp to Judique with an excursion to the Atlantic Coast and interior travel along the Transcanadian Highway from Whycocomagh to Baddeck and along the many back roads in the area centred around Glencoe Mills. It took me to much less than half of the Island and I failed to get photos at some of the places I did visit due to inclement weather; for example, I saw the beautiful area around Loch Lomond in the southeastern part of the Island for the first time ever on this trip, but, alas, through a downpour that precluded any picture taking—I’ll certainly be heading back there on a better day! Even if I had ranged more widely, the essay’s limit of twenty-five photos means I’d have had to discard many of them due to space limitations anyway. So, be advised that the Island has incredibly many places of beauty that this essay does not discuss—they are for you to discover. The previous essays in this series offer more depth on certain places than this essay can supply and present other parts of the Island neglected here, but even they do not cover many of the places of beauty on the Island. Indeed, if I am lucky enough to be able to continue this series for the next twenty years, I will still have done no more than to illustrate a very small part of all the beauty there is here to discover. Moreover, while looking at a photo can call to mind a wonderful memory and provide a hint of what one finds at a place, it is never a substitute for experiencing that place with all one’s senses, vastly more satisfying, real, and memorable.

Places are beautiful for many reasons: the ruggedness of a rocky coast; the stunning mountains and hills found everywhere in Cape Breton Island; the gorge carved by a persistent stream over the æons; a pleasing combination of sky, sea, and mountain; the steepness of a cliff falling into the ocean; clouds scraping the tops or sides of mountains; the quiet tranquillity of a babbling brook or a pretty river inexorably seeking the sea; the majesty of a great river; the birdsong that fills the air; the plants and flowers that, at certain times of the year, adorn a place, like those shown at the right: shamrocks found on the forest floor along MacIsaacs Glen Brook on the Bear Trap Trail in the Cape Mabou Highlands and the wild roses abloom on a huge bush on the hill just below the court house in Port Hood; the forests that cover the hills; the trees that change with the seasons: bare in winter, burgeoning foliage in spring, beautiful shades of green in summer, and a rainbow of colours in the fall; the undulating contours of the hills when viewed from above or from a distance; the inviting sand beaches; the constantly changing colours of fields and marshes; the birds and animals that share the trails with the hiker; the array of colours in a gorgeous sunset… Sometimes, one has to stop and take the measure of a place in order to discover what one would otherwise hurry past without really seeing and appreciating. One of the many joys of retirement is the added time it allows one to “stop and smell the roses”.

I hope you will enjoy the photos I have chosen here and I encourage you to join me in exploring the cornucopia of riches that this beautiful Island offers so freely to both its visitors and its residents.

Victor Maurice Faubert
2007 July 15

^[1] Quoted from this web site. The entire article is available in PDF format here.↩

Note: If you have not yet discovered this Nova Scotia government web site, which I first came across while preparing another essay, check it out! The high quality map of Nova Scotia is the best on-line map I know about that provides generally excellent coverage of Cape Breton Island, although it does contain two errors:

• As shown on the map, route 19 passes too far inland at Port Hood; in fact, the road passes directly by St. Georges Bay before turning inland toward Mabou.

• The village of Belle-Côte is shown as “Bell Cote” on the map, i.e., is missing the final ‘e’ on the first word, a hyphen, and a circumflex accent on the ‘o’; note that other locality names of French provenance such as Chéticamp and Grand-Étang have the appropriate diacritics, so Belle-Côte should as well.

I highly recommend you download this map, which is free, so that you have it at hand on your computer. If you are not familiar with the locations of places in Cape Breton, this map will assist you in finding many of the places I discuss in this essay and will also orient you to the area.

Feedback on the photos and the accompanying commentary, including corrections, is always welcome; it may be sent either to this site’s web master or to the essay’s author.