Alder Point and Coast East of Point Aconi

From Glace Bay to Sydney Mines, the northern coast of Cape Breton County, with a deep southern indentation for Sydney Harbour, is dominated by its urban areas. I will skip over this part of this coast in this essay, which is devoted to the county’s rural coast: although there are many beautiful, interesting, and even occasionally wild views from those areas, as one especially sees when taking the ferry to Newfoundland from North Sydney, they deserve an essay of their own. So, having jumped across much of the eastern and central parts of the northern Cape Breton County coast, one reaches Beautiful Point Aconi (celebrated in the fine slow air of that name by Lauchie Stubbert, Brenda Stubbert’s uncle) on Boularderie Island in the western part of the county not far from the Victoria county line.

This view looks south of southeast from Point Aconi towards Alder Point, the point which one sees furthest left of centre in this photo, although one can see as a grey band at the far left beyond Alder Point some of the coast line to the east that this essay has skipped. One of the two natural outlets of the Bras d’Or Lake system is the narrow Little Bras d’Or Channel, which lies on this (the west) side of Alder Point and becomes St Andrews Channel south of the Trans-Canada Highway (Highway 105) bridge over the channel.

Alas, this day, the last of my spring trip to the eastern coasts of Cape Breton, was not marked by the same fine weather that had held for most of the three previous days. There was a very strong wind from the northwest bearing down on the point, making it hard to stand and even harder to hold the camera still—as can be seen here, even the waves in the lee of Point Aconi are agitated. There was also moisture in the air, whether spray picked up by the wind or some mist from the skies I could not tell, but, in spite of this point’s great beauty, even under these skies, I did not long linger here outside the car—it was cold!