The Scottish Spirit of Cape Breton

It was a hot summer day, but Courtney MacPherson was dressed in wool. It wouldn't do to play the bagpipes in breezy cotton or linen, and MacPherson was in traditional Highland regalia -- box-pleated kilt and thick white stockings, low open-topped shoes called ghillie brogues, a necktie in a plaid to match his kilt, and a sporran, the traditional waist-hung pouch, decorated with an elk's head pin.

MacPherson, a trim, boyish-faced man of perhaps sixty, was wearing the tartan of the clan MacDonald -- the tartan of the Nova Scotia Highlanders militia, from which he is retired as regimental piper. He has been piping for thirty-eight years, and he plays today at the entrance to the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts at St. Ann's, Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. For nearly seventy years, the college has taught piping, Cape Breton fiddling and step dancing, Celtic harp, traditional weaving, and the Scots Gaelic language to students from around the world. "When a student comes here," says the college's executive director, Sam MacPhee, "he or she gets immersed in all aspects of the culture."

For Cape Breton native Courtney MacPherson, that immersion began at home. "I grew up in a family of pipers," he recalls. "Three out of six brothers play the pipes." It was in the archives of the college, though, that he learned the depth of his family's link with the ancient instrument, and not merely its latter-day breadth. "I'd known almost nothing about my great-grandfather, who came from Scotland and had a land grant here," he explains. "I only learned his name when I looked in the archives. ‘Angus MacPherson,' it said, ‘piper'."

Cape Breton Island is the jagged northeast tip of Nova Scotia, one of the ends of the Canadian Earth. It's a place where impenetrably forested mountains plunge straight to the sea, their descent interrupted only by the frail ribbon of the Cabot Trail; and where the vast saltwater sprawl of Bras d'Or Lake convolutes nearly every route between one place and another. Its rocky little Canso Causeway, a scant half-century old, is its only link to a province so tenuously peninsular that it is almost itself an island.

My wife Kay and I were on our first trip together to Cape Breton, an immersion course in the Celtic culture of the place. On separate earlier visits, we had each breezed past the superficial evidence of its Scottish heritage.  Tartans in the gift shops, names like "Iona" and "Creignish" on the road signs: it was Nova Scotia -- New Scotland -- after all, and why wouldn't there be a fair amount of plaid? Like most first-time visitors, we had come to drive the Cabot Trail, and we'd taken those little Celtic touchstones as so much surface gloss. A lot of people migrated to a lot of places in the New World. One hundred, two hundred years later, their heritage often boils down to pizza, cardboard shamrocks, and maybe a knish or two. Cape Breton, we figured, was another one of those places where ethnic identity is only trotted out on holidays.

But Cape Breton is different. Cape Breton -- especially the Gaidheal Tachd , the Gaelic Region along the Gulf of St. Lawrence -- is Scottish in its bones, and there isn't much it has forgotten.

We began to learn just how much the Cape Breton Scots remembered in the harbor town of Pictou, before we even crossed the causeway to the island. Pictou was the landing place of the Hector, a Scottish Mayflower, and today its wharfside museum floats a full-scale replica of the doughty and claustrophobic vessel. The Hector arrived in 1773 bearing nearly two hundred emigrants from the Highlands. They were human castoffs, thrown from their land during an episode prosaically called "the Clearances," when landowners acted on the notion that their real estate would be more profitably inhabited by sheep than by tenant farmers. During the next several decades the Hector pioneers would be joined by whole shires full of their countrymen. Between 1802 and 1807, some 25,000 came to Cape Breton alone.