Notes and photos from a couple of days of easy rides in a quiet corner of Ontario
Last week Marcia and I spent a few days in Prince Edward County, a peninsula in the northeast corner of Lake Ontario. We loaded our bikes onto/into our Subaru wagon, and with friends, rented an old farmhouse on a winery. Our visit was mostly about food, talk and drink, with breaks for some gentle cycling—nothing approaching Mike and Mary’s grand safari along the Murray, for example, or Julien’s journey through Ireland, Wales, and Wessex. I’ve written about “the County” before, so what follows may seem familiar for some.
The County was one of the first parts of Ontario to be settled by Europeans—farmers who were Quakers of Dutch and German descent from Pennsylvania in the mid-18th century. They were followed by refugees from the Significant Unpleasantness Next Door between 1776 and 1783. (Some of those refugees were Mohawks, but they didn’t get the better land—their descendants live further north on more marginal terrain on the mainland.) The County is fertile and well watered, and by the late 19th century, sustained a fairly prosperous agricultural economy. Fine old brick farmhouses from that era dot the landscape—photos 1 and 3 below are good examples. Nowadays, grapes have replaced the fruit and vegetables which were the primary crops a generation or more ago. The functions of older buildings have changed as well: the grand farmhouse in photo #3 houses a distillery, while the outbuildings in #2 are in disrepair.
Irises graced the garden of the distillery we visited (Photo #4), a family-owned affair nicely named “Kinsip”. I was always a sucker for any establishment making a pun in its title, and this one offers high-grade spirits, too. I nearly laid out far too much money for a Crimson Rye (the crimson hue from barrels which had held a local pinot noir, if you please), but chose instead a smaller brandy and a ditto rye with a hint of maple. In photo #5, Osi the Raven is restin’ his burden against a big old maple, while I photographed the super paint job in #6. (I was always a sucker for red-and-cream with silver accents.)
There are still standard-issue functioning farms, as well. Photo #7 shows an emerging crop (of beans, I think) in an impeccably groomed field, all in a flood of thundery light at sunset. In the pasture a little further along the road, the lovely bay in #8 allowed me to take her picture. Photo #9 is two of your basic summer farm colours, a field of bright yellow canola beneath a fine blue sky, with the accents of an aluminum barn roof and a wee bit of lake of a deeper blue.
The last word goes to the stylized rooster in #10. Barns all over the County show murals of quilt patterns. I liked this image of an audacious fellow—you might even say he was cocky. (Unless you thought for more than half a second before saying that…)
(Photos are spread over this post and the two following.)
