Middle River Views

On the last day of the festival, I attended the Pipers’ Ceilidh at the Gaelic College in St Anns, an afternoon concert. The night before, I had been at the dance in Southwest Margaree and stayed the night in Margaree Forks. In the morning, under very grey skies with occasional sunny breaks, I drove the Cabot Trail to Middle River West, where I turned onto the Middle River West Road (also known as the West Side Middle River Road), which I followed down to the Church Crossing Road; this is a pretty drive along the west side of the river with many fine views, though I didn’t stop for photos this day because of the skies. The Church Crossing Road is a short connector between the Middle River West Road and the Cabot Trail by the churches in Middle River; it crosses the Middle River over a bridge with good views of the river. A new footbridge has been constructed this past year parallel to the road bridge; that piqued my curiosity as a bit of sun was making its way through the dark clouds, so I stopped to explore and ended up taking a few pictures, some of which are shown on this page.

Middle River has two churches nearly side by side—only two large trees separate them: the one seen in photo #1 from the bridge on Church Crossing Road is the Middle River United Church; the other, the Farquharson Presbyterian Church, a bit larger, is to the right and outside the scope of this photo. Today, a community of some 450 persons, it was once more than double that size; a brief history of this area, settled by Gaelic-speaking Presbyterians, can be found here. The lovely tree to the right of the church is in the middle of changing—reds and oranges at the top and scattered throughout the lower unchanged green leaves. The Cape Breton Highlands, here darkened by the threatening skies, form the backdrop of this scene.

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Photo #2 looks downstream from the bridge over the Middle River on Church Crossing Road. Stray rays of the sun make the rough-water sections of the river sparkle in this view, but the prevailing dark skies obscure the Highlands to the south. The mountain at the left is unnamed on the topographical maps, but is well known to travellers of the Cabot Trail as it climbs to its top to reach the locality of Hunters Mountain, whence it descends on the other side to Buckwheat Corner south of Baddeck—a fine stretch of the Trail. Were the skies brighter, there would doubtless be more colour on the mountains, but the trees in the near distance, like that to the right of the church, appear mostly to be in very early stages of changing.

Photo #3 looks upstream from the footbridge along the course of the Middle River, happily lit up for a few seconds by a ray of sun breaking through the clouds. The Cape Breton Highlands can be seen in the far distance; odd bits of colour are found on the deciduous trees, many of which here have been stripped of their leaves. The Middle River is a popular fishing stream, not only here but along much of its length: did you spot the fisherman in waders trying his luck this day? The paths worn into the bank at the right indicate that many other fishermen have preceded him here.