Baddeck

The road into Baddeck runs along the shore of Bras d’Or Lake for several kilometres before the town appears, which gives you time to adjust to the strangeness of the thing: this is an inland sea. Bras d’Or Lake is a 1,100-square-kilometre tidal lake in the centre of Cape Breton Island — connected to the Atlantic by narrow channels, brackish rather than fresh, deep enough for ocean-going sailboats, with tides of up to a metre. Approaching it for the first time with the highlands rising behind and the water spreading ahead, I understood why Alexander Graham Bell chose this place to spend the last thirty years of his life and referred to it as the most beautiful place in the world.

The Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck is one of those museums that surprises you by making a famous person stranger and more interesting than you imagined. Bell is remembered as the inventor of the telephone, which is accurate but incomplete: he was also a genetics researcher, an aviation pioneer who built and flew experimental aircraft from this property in 1909, a prolific inventor of everything from metal detectors to hydrofoils, and a devoted husband who spent decades working with his deaf wife on communication technologies. The exhibition covers all of this without flinching, and the view from the hilltop site across Bras d’Or Lake is, as the man himself described it, excessive in its beauty.

The lake itself is the experience. The sailing here is exceptional — steady winds, protected waters, and the surreal quality of sailing surrounded by highland terrain. Several companies offer day charters, and the local yacht club welcomes visiting sailors with the particular warmth of a small community that takes its maritime traditions seriously. I went out one morning on a 38-foot sloop with a skipper who had been sailing this water for forty years and spent most of the time pointing at features on the shore that the charts don’t mark: the bay where the Mi’kmaw camped, the cliff where the eagles nest, the channel that looks navigable and absolutely is not.

The village of Baddeck itself is small enough to walk in twenty minutes and has the pleasant quality of small Cape Breton towns: a few excellent restaurants, a good bookshop, and the sense that the people here chose this specific place rather than ended up in it by accident. The Gaelic cultural layer remains present — you’ll see the language on some signs, hear it occasionally in the pub, and find that the traditional Cape Breton fiddle tradition lives here with the same unselfconscious vitality as in the bigger centres. On a warm summer evening, finding a session in a back room with the windows open toward the lake, the sound carries out over the water in a way that feels entirely right.

When to go: July through September for sailing and the best weather on the lake. The Bras d’Or Runners Regatta in August is worth scheduling around. October brings extraordinary fall colour reflected in the water and empty accommodation. Bell’s property is open May through October.