Sydney, Nova Scotia: Cape Breton Highlands, Celtic Music, and the Cabot Trail

The Cabot Trail, a 298-kilometer highway that circles the northern tip of Cape Breton around the Highlands, passes through the national park, along the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Atlantic coasts, and through the Acadian and Scottish communities of the Margaree Valley. The complete loop takes a full day by car; cruise day-trippers typically drive the most dramatic western section from Cheticamp through the Highlands to Pleasant Bay and back, which covers the most photographed coastal views (the cliffs above the Gulf of St. Lawrence between Cheticamp and French Mountain) and the moose habitat at the park's interior plateau. Moose are present and frequently visible at dawn and dusk; the population in the park is one of the densest in eastern Canada.

The Fortress of Louisbourg, forty-five kilometers south of Sydney, is the largest reconstructed eighteenth-century North American fortress in Canada — a one-quarter reconstruction of the French colonial fortified town that the British captured and demolished in 1760. The reconstruction began in the 1960s as an employment project and is now operated as a living history site: interpreters in period costume occupy the houses, bakery, fisherman's cottage, and military barracks, and the site conveys the scale of what Louisbourg meant to French imperial strategy in North America. The town was the third-busiest port in North America at its height; the reconstruction makes that claim legible.

Cape Breton fiddle music is heard most reliably at the céilidh (pronounced kay-lee) sessions that run most nights at pubs in Sydney and the surrounding communities. The Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts in St. Ann's, thirty kilometers north, is the only institution in North America that offers instruction in Scottish Gaelic language and Cape Breton fiddle in the same curriculum; summer visitors can sometimes observe afternoon classes or attend the Gaelic Mòd festival. The style of Cape Breton fiddle — characterized by Scottish Highland influences filtered through two centuries of isolation, with a rhythmic drive that is more pronounced than mainland Scottish fiddling — developed in the communities along the Margaree River and in Inverness County.

The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, on Bras d'Or Lake sixty kilometers west of Sydney, covers the last thirty-five years of Bell's life, which he spent in Cape Breton pursuing interests in aviation, marine engineering, and telecommunications. The museum holds the HD-4 hydrofoil, which Bell and Casey Baldwin built here in 1919 and which set a world water speed record of 70.86 mph that stood for ten years. The site is better than its subject matter might suggest — Bell's Cape Breton experiments were genuinely diverse and the museum presents them with appropriate ambition.

Cape Breton lobster, crab, and fish chowder anchor the menus in Sydney's restaurants and cafés; the local variant of fish and chips uses fresh Atlantic cod rather than the frozen variety, and the chowder is cream-based with potato, leek, and whatever shellfish arrived that morning. The Old Sydney Farmers' Market, held on Saturday mornings at the waterfront, sells Cape Breton cheese, smoked fish, and the jams and pickles that Nova Scotian farmsteads have been producing since the Acadian expulsion and subsequent resettlement.