Views at Pipers Cove

The Derby Point Road continues along the shore of the Bras d’Or Lake until it reaches the western edge of Pipers Cove, the bay of the Lake seen in Photo #1. The long line of cliffs runs in an arc from the road here to end at Benacadie Point at the far right of the photo. Immediately behind that point and extending inland for roughly 2.7 km (1⅔ mi) is Benacadie Pond, a very narrow inlet of the lake into which the Benacadie River flows from its source high in the Blueberry Barren north of Eskasoni. The topographical map shows the mountains here to also be part of the Boisdale Hills, seen previously in this essay from the Iona wharf.

Photo #2 shows the hill immediately across the road; it ends in the (unnamed) point at the far left of photo #1. At the base of the hill is a grassy field ending in a sand beach on which a lonely gull sits, avoiding the full blast of the wind off the lake. This is a popular summertime picnic and swimming spot; I have been here several times when folks were making merry on the beach down below. This hill is colonized solely by evergreens, a number of which are dead and others dying, presumably as a result of the spruce bark beetle infestation rampant on Cape Breton Island these past few years, so there are no fall colours to be seen on the hill; to find them, one has to look at the ground cover on the hill and the brown grasses just above the beach at the edge of the field.

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Photo #3 is a close-up view of the unnamed point where the hill seen in photo #2 comes down to the cove. A lobe of the cove is located behind the point: a narrow spit of land separates that lobe from Pipers Cove Pond, which, as best as I can make out from the topographical map, has no outflow into the cove; the north end Pipers Cove Pond can be seen from the Derby Point Road about 500 m (0.3 mi) from its junction with Highway 216. Also of note in photo #3 is the lovely rock arch seen right of centre; folded rocks are not all that unusual, but one that is nearly a perfect hemisphere is pretty rare. The waves breaking along the cliffs at the left attest to the strength of the wind that was pushing the water onshore this day.

Photo #4 shows the cliffs along the east side of Pipers Cove; here, the cliff faces are nearly vertical, with no sign whatsoever of the bending that must have taken place here to create the arch seen in photo #3.

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Photo #5 is a telephoto shot of Benacadie Point. An arm of the Bras d’Or Lake known as East Bay runs deep inland to the northeast beyond Benacadie Point. The houses on the far shore below the East Bay Hills, as those mountains are known, are in Irish Vale to the southwest of Big Pond. Highway 4, from St Peter’s to Sydney runs along the shore there.