Alone with Anne – Between Greenwich and the North Cape lay the Green Gables Shore, home to the other two sections of national park coastline -Dalvay and Cavendish. Along the way the landscape seemed to grow greener. At Dalvay I finally discovered the crowds so I continued on to North Rustico, where I met Tim and his kayaks and paddled beneath the copper-stained cliff’s near Cavendish. Sticking with the red theme I journeyed slightly inland to the place that gives the shoreline its name – Green Gables. It’s here that author Lucy Maud Montgomery set her story of red-headed Anne Shirley, an orphan adopted by Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert at the eponymous Green Gables house. The book spawned many sequels, a film trilogy, a TV show and even Canada’s longest-running musical – which is performed every year at the Charlottetown Festival. For many young girls (myself included), Anne put PEI firmly on their travel wishlists.
“Green Gables is like our version of Disneyland, but you have to go, it’s sort of mandatory,” Tim had told me. Worried that my imagined visions of this place would be ruined, it was with reluctance that I walked towards the famed house. In front stood Anne’, a local girl dressed as the book’s heroine, and my reluctance started to turn to regret. But then I discovered a number of nature walks, each one the inspiration for different narrative threads in Montgomery’s tales. Leaving the other visitors at the house, I passed the afternoon wandering Lover’s Lane’ and the ‘Haunted Woods’, the places I’d read about in my childhood brought to life before my eyes. It left me in such high spirits that even the strip of Gables-themed giftshops, motels and car number plates lining the road out of town couldn’t bring me down.
The wild west – Almost as soon as I’d passed the island’s second city of Summerside, the landscape and people changed. Agriculture is the big industry here. Sandy beachfronts were replaced by rolling fields of vermilion-coloured soil. The fishing villages became more functional than pretty – the fishermen more interested in hauling their loot rather than offering boat rides to tourists – and the hamlets became increasingly small. I stopped at Tignish Shore Beach, where there were no bathers, only a man picking seaweed. “Irish moss,” he explained in an accent that sounded somehow different to those of the islanders in Charlottetown. “I gather it then sell it.”
He went back to his picking and I looked a little closer; it was rubbery in texture. Around half the world’s Irish moss comes from PEL It’s harvested for its carrageenan, used as a thickener and stabiliser in everything from shampoos and toothpaste to ale and ice cream. Collectors use horses to drag baskets through the shallow water where it gathers, but it also appears on the shore after storms. I continued on to North Cape. As it’s the most northerly point on PEI I’d expected to be greeted by a giant lighthouse. Instead a wind turbine blade marked the spot (hiding a tiny lighthouse) along with a research station and a museum dedicated to the natural power being harnessed here. It was an indicator that problems with climate change are being addressed. And not before time: signs warned of the crumbling cliffs, which mixed with the sea, tinging the frothy wake blush pink. It was deliciously wild.
