British vs French

Fort Anne via Grand-Pre to Murphy's Cove

https://photos.app.goo.gl/8HJf9oLUjyYMZRam9

Before we left Annapolis Royal we did a tour of Fort Anne.  Our arrival was made more exciting by a sighting of some sort of brown, long bodied, furry tailed, shortish legged animal.  It ran from the Powder Magazine building over the fortifications towards the river/sea and then back round the main building and up and down another ditch towards some trees and the town.  A parks official was with us and thought it might be a mink.  It was bigger than  a big domestic cat.  Too quick and too distant for me to photograph sadly.
Fort Anne was interesting and had a bit of a British/Loyalist bias. 

After Annapolis Royal we drove the length of the Annapolis river valley.  The early french settlers (Acadians) had built dykes in the salt marshes to produce good quality farm land.  Too good really.  Nowadays there are a lot of hay fields and as you work further up the valley towards Grand Pre (Large meadow) the size of fields and the variety of crops increases.  This is quite a change from the rest of Nova Scotia where most of the land is covered in dense mixed woodland/forests.

We stopped the night at Evangeline Beach and saw first hand the extent of the enormous tidal range of the Bay of Fundy.  (See the photos in the above album)

This morning we visited the Grand Pre site.  This time the history was presented from an Acadian perspective and the exhibits and video presentations were in french with english very much second! 
It was the same story we have heard which basically boils down to Nova Scotia being in between New England (Boston Mass. area) and New France (Quebec area).  The french got there first, made friends with the local 'first nations' people, converted them to Roman Catholicism and set about farming, fishing and trading wood and furs and surplus crops.  Over the years Acadia changed between french and british rule and there were various battles.  The Acadians, according to today's presentation, were neutral.  However in the mid 18th century they were under great pressure to sign an oath of allegiance to Britain (and protestantism) and those who refused to do so (most of them) were forcibly deported in 1755 and their land, homes and belongings were confiscated.  New England 'planters', who were loyalists, were brought in and given the productive farms of the Acadians.  The Acadians were split up and sent to New England and some back to France.  Over the years some of them were able to make their way back to Nova Scotia but had to make do with poorer agricultural areas.  The Acadian flag ( a tricolour with a single star) flies bravely all through the areas of Yarmouth and Acadian Shores and Fundy Shore and Annapolis Valley.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote a classic poem about the 'deportation' called 'Evangeline: the tale of Acadie' which describes a fictional heroine, Evangeline and her search for loved ones after the deportation .

From Grand Pre we drove across the middle of Nova Scotia, back to the Halifax area and then east along the 'Eastern Shore'.  We have stopped at an idyllic spot near Tangier called Murphy's Cove.  Another stunning campground with suberb sea views and its own wharf/jetty.  Tonight we have enjoyed an evening around a campfire with Mr Murphy holding court and cooking complimentary mussells on the campfire.  He hauled a crate of them out of the sea and filled up a cooking pot and cooked them over the campfire.  Can't get much fresher than that!  Mr Murphy's family were from Ireland but have been here since 1750!  We asked about the mystery animal at Fort Anne and their suggestion is that it might have been a Marten but probably a 'fisher'.

A seal sometimes shows up for these nightly campfires but he was absent tonight unfortunately.