Ferryland

The Ferryland picnic has become famous, which is a strange thing to say about a lunch on a headland. The Colony of Avalon archaeology site in Ferryland operates a picnic service: you arrive, you walk the fifteen-minute trail up to the lighthouse meadow, and they bring you a basket with lobster rolls and fresh bread and sparkling water, and you lay out a blanket on the grass above the cliffs and eat while, if the season is right, icebergs drift past a few hundred metres offshore. I did this in July and the iceberg in question was enormous — a cathedral-shaped mass of blue-white ice that moved almost imperceptibly south on the Labrador Current while I ate my way through what was probably the best lobster roll of my life, which is the kind of sentence that sounds like an exaggeration and isn’t.

But Ferryland is more than lunch. The Colony of Avalon is a serious, ongoing archaeological excavation of a seventeenth-century English settlement founded by Sir George Calvert — the future Lord Baltimore — in 1621. Calvert intended Ferryland to be a Catholic refuge in the New World; what he built was a prosperous trading post that survived for nearly seventy years before being sacked by Dutch and then French raiders. It was essentially forgotten for three centuries until an archaeologist named James Tuck began excavating in 1993 and found, beneath the soil of a quiet seaside village, one of the most intact seventeenth-century colonial sites in North America.

The excavation tours run from May through early October and are led by archaeology students who explain what they are doing in real time, because the dig is active — they are still finding things. I watched a student sieve through soil from a trench and pull out fragments of pipestem and blue-and-white delftware and, at one point, a small copper pin of the type used to fasten clothing in the 1640s. Holding it for a moment — tiny, green with oxidation, the last thing touched by someone whose name is unknown — gave me the particular quality of vertigo that the best small historical objects produce.

The interpretive centre holds the finds from thirty years of digging: thousands of artefacts from the early seventeenth century, including ceramic vessels, iron tools, glass bottles, a physician’s kit, seeds and plant remains that tell you what people grew and ate. The display is unusually good — clear, contextual, not dumbed down — and the staff clearly love what they’re talking about. Ferryland town itself is small and quiet, a handful of streets below the headland, with a few bed-and-breakfasts and a view of the sea from almost every window.

When to go: May through September. The picnic service operates from late May through August and has become popular enough that booking ahead online is strongly recommended, particularly in July when both the icebergs and the tourist traffic peak. Archaeology tours run on a set schedule from the interpretive centre.