In the afternoon at Digby Nova Scotia we took a very short drive to Point Prim lighthouse at the tip of a small peninsula facing the Bay of Fundy. In my view the standard place for a photograph, from the trail leading to it, did not offer a good place for photographs. So I walked out to a rock shelf overlooking the beach and in the opposite direction offering the lighthouse. It was a bit of a perilous viewpoint however. At least to a big chicken like me. I was too scared to walk to the edge like some local kids were doing. We met a man here who was running for the municipal election, but sadly, I forgot his name so later could not determine if he had won or not. He seemed like a good man on a family walk in the park.
Point Prim is a special place for local. At one time the foghorn was a constant reminder of the lighthouse nearby and helped to attract many of them out to the park. A plaque referred to it as “a wondrous trumpet echoing across the bay.”
It is also a great place to see the channel between the Annapolis Basin and the Bay of Fundy. The locals call this the Digby Gut. In Mi’Kmaq it is called Tuitnuk, meaning simply, the outflow. The Bay of Fundy gets its name from a French word fendu meaning “split”.
Chris enjoying the sun along the coast
In 1605 Samuel Champlain and Pierre Dugua de Mons ventured through this area which they estimated could hold 200 boats. Later that year he returned to establish the first European settlement north of Florida and called it Port Royal in honour of the King. It is still there but the name has changed to Annapolis Royal.
The first lighthouse here was built in 1804 long before Confederation. It only lasted for 2 years before it burned to the ground. A replacement was built in 1817 by the regional coast guard.
This is called Krumholz. In German that means “crooked wood.” That is trees created by winds off icy coast that makes it difficult for branches to grow on the windy side of the tree.
The exposed bedrock on which I was clambering was created 201 million years ago. The volcanic rock was the result of eruptions that occurred when Pangea, the massive continent that was at the time the only continent in the world, started to break up into separate continents. The octagonal (sort of ) shapes of volcanic columns that are now just stumps as a result of thousands of years of erosion. When we travelled to Ireland in 2009 we saw large columns of such rocks as part of the Giant’s Causeway, that were protruding out of the ground, because they had somehow escaped the glaciers. Here the ice has pummelled them down to bedrock.
The Digby Gut was a channel that was formed by thousands of years of erosion mainly from continental glaciers, along a fault line that is now the Bear River. That is where we travelled next.