Annapolis Royal
"These were not grand fortifications. They were small groups of men, terrifyingly cold, arguing over a wilderness."
There is a moment on St. George Street in Annapolis Royal when the weight of history becomes physically apparent, not in a heavy way but in the way of a place that has been continuously inhabited since Europeans first tried to stay in North America. Samuel de Champlain arrived here in 1605. The French built a fort. The English took it and renamed it. The French tried to take it back. This happened repeatedly for over a century, and the earthworks of Fort Anne — the oldest national historic site in Canada — still hold the shape of those arguments in grass and mud.
Fort Anne is not a dramatic ruin or a reconstructed village. It is a set of earthen fortifications — geometrically precise star-shaped walls of grass-covered soil, now peaceful and somewhat pastoral — surrounding a small heritage house that contains the artefacts and records of the settlement. Walking the ramparts, the scale of the early colonial conflict becomes clear in a way that a museum never quite achieves: these were not large fortifications. These were small groups of men, terrifyingly cold and underfed, defending a few wooden buildings in the wilderness of what they called Acadia from other small groups of men who had equally tenuous claims to be there. The landscape around them — the tidal marshes, the forested ridges — was indifferent to their arguments.
The town of Annapolis Royal itself is remarkable for a different reason: it has not been polished out of itself. St. George Street runs through a continuous block of Georgian and Victorian architecture that has remained largely intact because the town was never wealthy enough for the development that would have destroyed it. The result is a street that looks as it did in 1830, more or less, with clapboard houses in muted colours set close to the sidewalk and small gardens behind iron fences.
The town’s tidal garden — a series of vegetable and flower beds that are deliberately flooded by the Bay of Fundy at each high tide — is a working experiment in Acadian farming techniques and one of the more unusual kitchen gardens I’ve seen anywhere. And the Annapolis Royal Farmers’ Market, held on Saturdays in what appears to be a building from about 1900, has been running in various forms since the settlement’s earliest years, which would make it the oldest farmers’ market in North America — a claim the town makes with the slightly competitive pride of places that have been keeping track. The woman who sells heritage apple varieties from her orchard on the Annapolis Valley ridge can tell you more than you might have anticipated wanting to know about Gravenstein apple genetics, and you will not be sorry you asked.
When to go: May through October covers the farmers’ market season and the full summer. July sees the gardens in peak bloom and the longest days. October brings brilliant fall colour along the Annapolis River valley and the rare pleasure of having the town almost entirely to yourself.