Knowlton

Knowlton is technically one of seven hamlets that make up the municipality of Lac-Brome, but it’s the one everyone means when they say the name, and after an afternoon there I understood why the others don’t get equal billing. The village sits at the northern end of Lac Brome, its main street — Lakeside — lined with nineteenth-century brick and clapboard buildings now occupied by antique dealers, independent boutiques, and the kind of café where the espresso is taken as seriously as it would be in Montreal.

We came, honestly, partly for the duck. Lac Brome duck is a genuine regional institution — the Brome Lake Ducks farm has been raising ducks here since 1912, and the bird shows up on menus across the Townships and well beyond, but eating it in the village that made it famous felt like the correct way to encounter it. We had duck confit at a small restaurant on the main street, and it was rich in the unapologetic way French cooking can be when nobody’s trying to lighten it for anyone.

The village has a theatrical history too — Théâtre Lac Brome runs a summer season in a converted building downtown, and Knowlton has for decades attracted a mix of anglophone old money and newer arrivals drawn by the antique trade, which means the shops here have a genuinely good density of actual finds rather than the tourist-trap version of “antiques” you sometimes get in prettier villages. Lia spent a happy hour in a shop full of old Quebec pine furniture while I wandered down toward the lake, where a small public beach and a marina give the village its water access.

There’s a museum, the Brome County Historical Museum, housed in several heritage buildings including an old courthouse, that does a better job than most small-town museums of explaining the layered history of English and French settlement in this specific pocket of the Townships — worth the hour if the weather turns.

When to go: September and October for foliage against the historic architecture, plus the fall duck season on local menus. Summer for the theatre festival and lake access. The antique shops and restaurants mostly stay open year-round, making Knowlton one of the more reliable Townships villages for an off-season visit.