Myles Doyle Falls

Myles Doyle Falls is on a brook that the topographical map does not name;¹ it flows into Glen Brook, which eventually flows into River Denys, which in turn empties into the Bras d’Or Lake east of West Alba. You reach the falls by taking the River Denys Road just south of exit 3 on the Trans-Canada Highway in Melford. This unpaved road is often not in the best of shape, although it was OK the day I drove it in 2013; you may prefer to park your car at the start of the road just off the Trans-Canada Highway and walk the 1 km (⅔ mi) up the road to the falls. If you drive, watch for a wide place in the road and some flagging tape on your right (not always present); keep your windows open and listen for the falls. If you get to the “Devil’s Elbow”, as the hairpin curve a bit further up the road is known, you have gone too far: turn around and drive back 180 m (0.1 mi) to the falls.

¹ According to this web site, the brook is McMillans Brook and, according to a commenter on that site, was once the site of a tannery, presumably established by one Myles Doyle. Courtesy of the wayback machine archive, I also located here a genealogical reference to a Myles Doyle of Melford, Inverness County, whose ancestors were Irish and whose wife was named Mary, with whom he had two sons, Anselm and Daniel, together with a photo of Anselm dating from the 1880’s, but no other information about him or his activities.↩

When you leave the road (to the left and outside the scope of this photo), you will descend a flight of stairs to the little glen seen in photo #1, where you may enjoy a picnic at the foot of the falls on the table provided. A campfire circle has been made of cement blocks, new since the last time I was here. I do not know who is responsible for these amenities, but they are appreciated. The sun does make its way down into the glen, but you should expect to find it noticeably cooler than up by the road, in part because of the cooling spray of the falling water.

Photo #2 is a close-up of the falls, taken from near the edge of the pool at their base. The waterfall is some 20 m (70 ft)² high and is quite noisy when the water is flowing as plenteously as it was this day. There are three cascades, each roughly the same height; during the spring run-off and after heavy rains, considerably more water falls than is seen here.³

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² This figure comes from Pat O’Neil’s Explore More! guide book, p. 28, and seems closer to me than the figure of 12 m (40 ft) given here.↩

³ For pictures of these falls at other times of year, including a couple with substantially more flow in the lower cascade, see this web page.↩

Photo #3 shows the upper cascade, across which a log has fallen. The cascade is set back away from the lower two cascades, having carved a flume through the rocks on either side. Because of the angle of view and the distance from the base, it appears smaller than the middle cascade, but I’d not be surprised to learn that it was the tallest of the three. Notice the two little trees on the left side of the falls that are stretching up for their place in the sun; notice, too, the base of the trunk of a much larger tree on the right, gripping the soil on top of the rocks with all its might.

Photo #4 looks at the middle cascade, spilling over the edge of the rock in front of the upper cascade’s pool and forming a dense torrent of water. Besides being wet, the adjacent rocks are moss-covered and slippery.

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Photo #5 shows the lower cascade, which carries the outflow of the pool at the base of the middle cascade, which can be seen here to be further back from the lower one. For whatever reason, the main flow is at the left, though notice the smaller spurt of water seemingly coming through a hole in the rock at the right, likely diverted by an obstacle behind the central slab. Because I was much closer to this cascade, the scale is necessarily less than the telephoto lengths used for the two upper cascades; it is therefore hard to compare this one, which appears smaller, with the two preceding photos.

Photo #6 looks at the brook as it flows past the picnic table and carries on down the mountainside, much wider here than the narrow slot through which the cascades fall. One sees lots of dead wood in this scene that could be used for that campfire, but it’s likely to be too wet to burn well.

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Taken from the base of the falls, but looking in the opposite direction, photo #7 captures the glen. The brook at the left curves past the table and then curves back again beyond it.

Photo #8 is a look at the brook from a different angle, where its curve around the point near the middle of the photo sends it back to the left. Again, there is plenty of downed and dead wood here, some of which has been stacked by the force of the waters into near dams, such as the one at the centre of the photo.