Avonlea

I expected that there could only be one Canadian experience to top buying a Canadian edition of Anne of Green Gables (pictured left) in Canada - visiting the “real-life” Avonlea.

I was extremely lucky that my cousin had moved to Prince Edward Island just two weeks before my Halifax conference and that her lovely husband was willing to come and collect me from my hotel and take me back to the airport (a three or three-and-a-half hour trip each way).

 

L.M. Montgomery is BIG business on Prince Edward Island. I had expected something like the cult of Robert Burns in my native Ayrshire, but nothing could prepare me for the giftware and pictures, the summer festival and plays and musicals and even tea-tins branded with Anne of Green Gables.

The centrepiece of Anne-mania is Avonlea Village, set in Cavendish, where Montgomery grew up with her grandparents. We took a run out there and looked over the low white fences at tightly-packed old-stylee shops and the Church Montgomery attended (below), which was apparently relocated from elsewhere in Cavendish to form the centrepiece of the theme-park. In the season, the village is populated by actors in Edwardian dress, including and Anne, Gilbert Blythe and Diana Barry, and people come from all over the world to see it, pay tribute to Montgomery and buy hats with red nylon pigtails stitched in (the PEI equivalent of the Scottish ‘See You Jimmy’ hat).

I was, on the whole, glad to be there slightly off season, glad to have just come from Halifax, so recognisable from Anne of the Island as the university Anne and Gilbert Blythe attend (Montgomery read Literature at Dalhousie), and glad that before coming to “Avonlea” we’d gone for a walk on the shoreline, on the sand dunes that stand out in my imagination as the scene of Anne’s own walks and heart-to-hearts with Diana when she was just beginning to outgrow the Avonlea of the books … the real Avonlea, books often being more real than buildings and houses … sand and sea more evocative than actors in a theme park, however professionally done.