Centennial Ferme Le Cabot Trail, 200 acres. Familial, Désolé, aucun Animaux

Buchanan House is a centennial farmhouse built by the descendants of the original settlers from the Western Isles of Scotland who came to Cape Breton Island after their lands were seized and homes put to the torch during the period known as “the highland clearances”. The roof is high-pitched to help to shed the heavy snowfalls of our Eastern Canadian winters. This results in the ceilings in some of the rooms on the second floor having a slope or a dormer window incorporated.

To our educated guests, this offers a unique experience heightened by inclusion of a wood stove and artifacts that include horse tack, bridles, girth straps and brasses as well as old carpenter’s tools and an iron plough share broken by the rocks and boulders in the meadow beside the house. There are also copies of books the settlers would have read in the long winter evenings written, of course, in Gaelic. We have a display of original photographs of the house and the last members of the Buchanan family to live in our lovely home.

Our returning guests (and the numbers are fast increasing) spend most of their time and energies exploring our beautiful island with its sensational landscapes and seascapes, its hiking trails, sandy beaches, whale sightings, the magnificent fortress at Louisburg, and unique fiddle music. Some attend activities at the nearby Gaelic College where they learn the basics of the language, its music, its arts and its crafts that include local hand-made musical instruments and remastered Scottish musical scores.

Rather regrettably, our guests seem to have judged the success of their visit to our island in relation to the dimensions of the bedrooms or the ceilings that they carefully measured or the bathtub design or the number of cobwebs (real or imaginary). They offer gratuitous advice on the layout of our home or the use of our washing machine. For the record, other guests at Buchanan House this summer found no evidence of cobwebs and the only dirt we, the owners, found was that left by the guests of July 20th. Did they learn a few words of Gaelic, attend a Ceilidh, take a walk along the splendid North River, see the bald eagles or watch the gannets diving for fish? I sure hope so.

Roger Butterworth