“Whales vocalise through their blowholes, mooing like cows as they round up the capelin into the rocks. You can just walk along here and see them do their thing without disturbing them. And over there they swim right up on to the beach on their bellies, somehow always managing to get themselves free again. You can just be standing there and suddenly find yourself face to face, within 10ft of these leviathans. It’s absolutely incredible. It defies description, but it really takes place.”
John Fisher, the British expat owner of Fishers’ Loft, a hotel on the eastern coast of Canada’s easternmost province, is talking about his love of this beautiful part of the world as we take the circular stroll along the Skerwink Trail, named one of the 35 best walks in North America and Europe by Travel + Leisure magazine. The geological conditions here have created massive freestanding vertical rocks, separate from the cliff face, called “sea stacks”. The view is exceptional. I tell Fisher I could happily do this walk every day for the rest of my life.
“That’s what my wife and I thought when we first came here,” says Fisher, who’s 70 but looks a good decade younger in his blazer and white hat. “So we stayed! We pinch ourselves every day, we can’t believe we were this smart. A lot of the houses round here are now owned by ex-hotel guests of mine who loved the place so much they couldn’t bear to leave.”
The paths are shored up with boardwalks and wooden steps in the muddier areas, more to protect the environment than for the comfort of visitors, although it certainly helps. The trees are festooned with old man’s beard. “Kids love that stuff. They put it on their chins. They come off this walk and they look like little green Santa Clauses!” And, in spring, one of the great sights is the icebergs drifting past. People bring their picnics, says Fisher, and just sit and watch: “They’re not styrofoam, you know. When they break up they release thousands of tonnes of ice into the water; it’s tremendous!”
And then, when you thought the walk could not get any more beautiful, you come out on to a round hill with a 360-degree panoramic view of the vast ocean, the infinite sky and the thin strips of land on which people have stubbornly carved out a life for themselves on the windy shores of the Atlantic – and in some cases a surprisingly comfortable one, at that. Across the water is the famously beautiful little town of Trinity, which despite having only 150-odd houses boasts a theatre, grand church and parish hall. This was the centre of the cod trade for centuries, and made the merchant families very rich, back in the days when English fishing captains reported that the shoals were “so thick by the shore that we hardly have been able to row a boat through them”.
We’re nearing the end of the walk. I pick some juicy berries off a blueberry bush, and look out longingly on to the lake where Fisher and his wife swim in summertime: “We often have a moose looking at us, or an otter swimming along with us. I know it sounds too cute for words, but it really is true.”
www.theskerwinktrail.com. For more on John Fisher and his remarkable hotel, click here.
