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Today I
was to meet Reg (Dutch) Thompson who has been recording talks with PEI's
elderly citizens for a number of years now and thus building up a
wonderful archive of historical information about island and people's
lives on it. I was given a warm reception and spent a couple of hours with
him while he regaled me with stories about the island. Dutch also
has a large collection of old photographs of many buildings and fishing
boats and it's just as well as many are no longer in existance now.
There you can see Dutch with some of his audio
recordings behind him. He's going to try and send me some wee audio tracks
of a few of his interviews and when they arrive I'll certainly get them up
on the site for you to listen to.
I then headed for Belfast and came across the
Selkirk Cove where there were a few plaques commemorating the landing.
It was almost impossible to take these
pictures as the sun was so bright I could see the little LCD screen on the
camera. On the right is my hire car and you look over it to the cove.
I'm told that when the settlers landed the
trees were growing right down to the beach. The picture on the right was
of a small cemetary but the snow was too deep to try to get close ups of
the graves.
As an aside... I will say that it is quite
difficult to identify towns and villages as most just don't seem to have a
sign up telling you that you've arrived and then they don't seem to be
communities as they are so spread out. For example I was heading for
Belfast which shows up well on the road map but all I really saw was the
Belfast School and a few buildings. I really don't know if that was
it or if I missed it somehow. I found the same with my visit to
Cavenish.
I now drove around the Belfast area for a bit
trying to take some pictures of the area...
A sign saying Isle of Skye
When I
visited Dutch he told me about an historical meeting at Stanhope that
might be interesting to visit so I headed up there early to get a couple
of pictures before the sun went down.
As you can see the sea was frozen and from the
sign you can see that this was the first Scottish settlement on the island
And a full moon at the Community centre
The meeting started with an introduction,
report on the last minutes and then a financial statement of the society.
Then we had the President of the Scottish Caledonian Society giving a most
interesting talk about olden times in PEI with many humourous stories.I
think it is fair to say that everyone thoroughly enjoyed the meeting after
which tea, coffee and home made goodies were available. Everyone made me
most welcome and I very much enjoyed my visit.
Essentially I very much enjoyed my day seeing
the country and meeting many folk from the island and I'd like to take
this opportunity to thanks them all for their time and their warm welcome.
So.. what did I learn from today? Well
several people were of the opinion that over 60% of the population of
P.E.I. have Scots blood in them. Driving around there were Scots names all
over the place on road signs, villages and towns and on post boxes on the
road. Many of the people I met had Scots names and in many respects I
found the area to be somewhat like the Isle of Skye in some of the
landscape and the way the houses are well spaced out and with no fences or
hedges around them. I learned that P.E.I. was once the centre of a huge
ship building industry and that there ships sailed on all the oceans of
the world. I was told of one graveyard on the island where you can
see headstones that list all those oceans. It's quite amazing how
this industry has simply vanished. Even the small boats are now made out
of fibreglass. So once where there waa a great tradition of wood working
this industry just doesn't exist anymore and it's now mostly agriculture.
I was also told that the island is seeing a
net gain in population but it's the older people that are retiring to the
island that has done that. There is still a move towards the major
town on the islands so there are homes and land aplenty for those able and
willing to live here. |
