Today we bring you another sample of one of the chapters you’ll find in our latest publication now available on Amazon in Kindle or paperback. Nova Scotia & PEI Armchair Adventures is the first volume in our Ten Provinces, Zero Crowds series. You can find it HERE.
Basin Head Provincial Park is on the map. The singing sands are on the map. The phenomenon of sand that produces a faint squeak or whistle when you walk on it, caused by the particular grain size and surface texture of the silica, has been written about enough that it appears in most PEI travel guides and draws people to the eastern Kings County shore specifically to experience it. What is not on the map, and what most visitors who come for the singing sands never find, is what lies beyond the park boundary along the tidal lagoon and the surrounding headlands, in a landscape of dune, marsh, and red sandstone cliff that is among the finest coastal walking on the island.
The lagoon at Basin Head is a biological curiosity that the singing sands tend to overshadow.
The Basin Head Fisheries Museum, which interprets the traditional inshore fishery of eastern PEI from its position at the entrance to the lagoon, is itself worth more time than most visitors give it. The tidal lagoon it overlooks is an internationally designated site for Irish moss, a species of red algae that grows in dense mats along the lagoon walls and that was once harvested by hand by local fishermen using horse-drawn rakes working in the shallow water. The harvesting method was adapted to the particular conditions of the Basin Head lagoon, which is connected to the sea by a narrow channel that creates strong tidal currents and an ecosystem more saline and productive than most island lagoons. The Irish moss from this lagoon and the surrounding coast was processed into carrageenan, a food additive derived from the algae that ended up in everything from ice cream to salad dressing to pharmaceutical coatings, representing a substantial industry built on a specific stretch of PEI coastline.
The walking trail that follows the lagoon’s edge east from the park, past the suspension footbridge and along the dune system toward the open coast, is maintained but not heavily used. It passes through a transition zone between the sheltered lagoon environment and the exposed Gulf of St. Lawrence shoreline, and the bird life along this transition reflects the ecological richness of the boundary between the two systems. Osprey nest near the lagoon. Great blue herons work the shallows. In August, the dune slacks between the sand ridges hold a mix of late-summer wildflowers that includes species rare on the island and that rewards the kind of attention most people on a beach vacation have not quite calibrated themselves to pay.
The dune system east of the park is part of a barrier beach complex that has been migrating landward over the past several centuries as the sea level rises and the sand supply from the eroding red sandstone cliffs adjusts to the ongoing loss. The cliffs themselves, visible from the beach east of the park, are actively eroding in ways that make the shoreline here measurably different from decade to decade, and the red sandstone that falls from them is what maintains the distinctive colour of the beach sand in this area. Walking along the base of these cliffs at low tide, with the red rock face overhead and the Gulf stretching to the horizon, is a reminder that PEI is not a stable landmass but a temporary arrangement of sediment that the sea will eventually renegotiate. The island loses several centimetres of coastline to erosion each year in some sections, a rate that has been accelerating with changing storm patterns, and the eastern shore is among the most exposed.
One fact about the Basin Head lagoon that most visitors do not know: it supports one of the last populations of the freshwater pearl mussel on Prince Edward Island, a bivalve whose presence in the lagoon’s upper reaches indicates water quality conditions that have become increasingly rare on an island where agricultural runoff has degraded most freshwater systems. The pearl mussel is one of the longest-lived invertebrates on Earth, with some individuals reaching over a hundred years of age, and finding a viable population on PEI is the kind of discovery that generates more excitement in conservation biology circles than it does in travel writing. It is worth generating some excitement here, because the conditions that support that population are neither guaranteed nor permanent.
The community of Basin Head itself, a small cluster of homes along the road above the lagoon, has the quality of a place that has been in its location for a specific reason and has not been asked to be anything else. The fishermen who worked from the lagoon and the adjacent shore are mostly gone from the water now, but the stages and the old fish sheds and the general orientation of the settlement toward the coast speak to a way of living that was organized around the sea’s offerings rather than the land’s. Stopping here before or after the beach walk, talking to anyone willing to talk, produces a version of the eastern Kings County experience that the park’s interpretive materials cannot replicate.
Getting to Basin Head from Charlottetown takes about an hour and a half along the Trans-Canada and then east through Souris, which is worth a stop on its own. Souris is the departure point for the ferry to the Magdalen Islands, which is a journey for another book, but the town has a harbour and a main street and a bakery and the kind of useful, undecorated character that small PEI towns have when they are not on the tourist circuit. From Souris, the road east to Basin Head passes through some of the quieter farm and coastal land on the island, red fields running to the water, potato crops in July, the particular spaciousness of the eastern shore.
The singing sands do sing, or squeak, depending on your expectations. Whether you hear them depends partly on the moisture content of the sand and partly on the technique with which you drag your foot across the surface, and the experience varies from a clearly audible phenomenon to something you have to convince yourself you are actually hearing. This variability is itself interesting, a natural effect that performs differently on different days and for different visitors. But the sounds you do not have to strain to hear at Basin Head are the ones the lagoon and the dunes make without any help: the osprey calling over the water, the wind through the dune grass, the tidal current moving through the channel that connects the sheltered water to the open Gulf beyond. Those sounds are available to anyone who walks far enough past the singing sands to find them.
