Prince Edward Island Guide

The freckly face and pert pigtails of Anne of Green Gables are emblazoned on much of Prince Edward Island's publicity material, and her creator, local-born novelist Lucy Maud Montgomery, was the island's most gushing propagandist, depicting the place floating on the waves of the blue gulf, a green seclusion and haunt of ancient peace invested with a kind of fairy grace and charm. Radical William Cobbett, who soldiered here in the 1780s, was not so dewy-eyed, and saw instead a rascally heap of sand, rock and swamp a lump of worthlessness [that] bears nothing but potatoes. Each had a point. The economy may not be quite as uniform as Cobbett suggested, but PEI does remain thoroughly agricultural - Million-Acre Farm, as it's sometimes called. On the other hand, the country's smallest province - a crescent-shaped slice of land separated from Nova Scotia and New Brunswick by the Northumberland Strait - can be beguiling. The island's long and complicated shoreline is banded by sandy beaches in the north and serrated by dozens of bays and estuaries, where the ruddy soils and grassy tones of the rolling countryside are set beautifully against the blue of the sea.

Charlottetown, the capital and only significant settlement on Prince Edward Island, sits on the south coast beside one of these inlets, the tree-lined streets of the older part of town occupying a chunky headland that juts out into a wide and sheltered harbour. With its graceful air, wide range of accommodation, and good restaurants, this is easily the best base for exploring the island, especially as almost all of PEI's villages are formless affairs whose dwellings ribbon the island's roads. One exception is Victoria, a tiny old seaport southwest of Charlottetown, which makes a peaceful overnight stay. Otherwise, Orwell Corner Historic Village, just to the east of the capital, is an agreeable attempt to re-create an island village as of 1890; Cavendish , on the north coast, boasts the house that Montgomery used as the setting for her books; and, close by, Prince Edward Island National Park, the island's busiest tourist attraction, has kilometres of magnificent sandy beach. Further east is the rough-and-ready township of Souris, ferry port for the Īles-de-la-Madeleine (Magdalen Islands ) and located just down the coast from the beach and fishery museum of Basin Head . In the west, the chief interest is social: descendants of PEI's Acadian settlers - once the majority of the population - today constitute some fifteen percent of the island's inhabitants and many of them live on the wedge of land that runs down from the village of Wellington to Cap-Egmont.

Prince Edward Island is a major holiday spot, so there's plenty of accommodation to choose from with B&Bs, inns, cottages and campsites liberally sprinkled across the whole of the island - though it's still a good idea to make advance reservations during July and August. Note, also, that although it's easy to reach Charlottetown by bus the rest of PEI has hardly any public transport . On a culinary note, PEI has a reputation for the excellence of its lobsters , which are trapped on the west side of the island during August and September and in the east from June to July. A number of restaurants specialize in lobster dishes, but keep a look out for local posters advertising lobster suppers, inexpensive buffet meals served in some church and community halls during the summer.

Tiny Charlottetown, the administrative and business centre of Prince Edward Island, is the most urbane spot on the island, its comfortable main streets - Grafton and Kent - hemmed in by leafy avenues of clapboard villas, the most opulent of which spread west of the centre towards Victoria Park . Charlottetown is an exceptionally pleasant place to spend a couple of days and it also has, in small-island terms, a reasonable nightlife , with a handful of excellent restaurants and a clutch of good bars.

Prince Edward Island is divided into three counties. In the middle is Queens County, which incorporates the province's most popular tourist attractions and has some of its prettiest scenery. It also boasts the island's finest beaches, stretching along the northern shore and protected within the Prince Edward Island National Park. To the east of Queens lies Kings County comprising two broad geographical areas, with the tree-dotted farmland and estuary townships of the south giving way to wilder scenery further north, and to the west is Prince County, which makes up the flattest part of PEI, its broad-brimmed, sparsely populated landscapes curving round a handful of deep bays. The provincial government has worked out three scenic drives covering each of the counties: Lady Slipper Drive (287km) to the west, Blue Heron Drive (191km) in the centre, and the Kings Byway Drive (367km) to the east. However, although these drives visit everything of interest, they are frequently dreary, so unless you really love driving it's better to be more selective.

Drawing thousands of visitors every summer, Queens County's main attraction is the Prince Edward Island National Park, whose gorgeous sandy beaches, extending along the north shore for some 40km, are ideal for swimming and sunbathing. Rarely more than one or two hundred metres wide, the park incorporates both the beaches and the sliver of low red cliff and marram-covered sand dune that runs behind - a barrier which is occasionally interrupted by slender inlets connecting the ocean with a quartet of chubby little bays. A narrow road runs behind the shoreline for most of the length of the park, spanning several of these inlets, but forced into a detour at the widest, the main channel into Rustico Bay, which effectively divides the park into two. The smaller, more westerly portion runs from Cavendish - the site of Green Gables House - to North Rustico Harbour; the other (and much more enjoyable section) from Robinson's Island to Dalvay and Tracadie Bay. In either section, it's easy enough to drive along the shore road behind a goodly proportion of the beach until you find a place to your liking.