CONTENTS Dedication Introduction A Castle Mound Tales the Micmacs told: the King's Refuge in the Woods Now it was Ours A Stone Marked with a Cross and a Scottish Connection Two Hilltops and a Norse Connection Burning-off - and a Viking Sword-tip The Castle Ghosts "Tom's Tower", the Headless Statue and a Christmas Star Mer Rika, Sudhrike, Oak Island and Carved Stones The Herm and the "Cross" Dungeons? Fort Point Connection? Castle Confirmed Walls, Sand and the Garden Shed A Lost Castle - and an Accident Ancient Peoples and the Stone Circle The Goldsmiths' Shop The Work Continues APPENDIX Chronology: A Few Notes How the Towers Fell Aerial Photograph Norsemen and Gold Bridging the Gap: Evidence of Continuous Contact Identity of Norsemen Additional Evidence of Norse Presence Additional Evidence of Presence of Earlier Peoples Norse Roots in the Language of the Algonquians How Herms Originated Bibliography Index

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Introduction

The legend of a trans-Atlantic Arcadia was based on more than just the visits to its shores by Giovanni Verrazano in 1524, two years after news came through of Magellan's death during a round-the-world voyage in 1521. Stories of a European king of fabulous wealth in North America go back to fishermen's tales during the 14th century and to travellers' tales even earlier. El Dorado, the Man of Gold, got confused in people's minds with a mythical country of the same name, and with the Fortunate Isles of earlier times, off the North African coast. Many such names also became associated with the Isle or Isles of the Seven Cities, a land where seven golden citadels were believed to have been built, presumably by the Man of Gold. Also associated was the legend of a rustic paradise of the kind believed to have existed in the centre of the Peloponnesus in Greece: Arcadia. The truth was that the average person had no idea what really lay beyond the vast and treacherous Atlantic and there must have been almost as many tales as there were people telling them. Right up to the time of Christopher Columbus's first voyage in 1492 most people imagined that beyond the great ocean only a few islands separated Europe from all the riches of the Orient. Columbus changed all that when he made his discovery of the Caribbean public. We now know that he was preceded by others who for various reasons remained uncommunicative after their return to Europe, some such as fishermen perhaps because their only objective was to make a living, but others because they wanted to protect their own interests. For instance, if gold had indeed been found, telling the world would only result in a "gold-rush". That was indeed what happened centuries later.

Back to Verrazano: we can say with reasonable certainty that the coast he visited was that of what is now Nova Scotia, then called Sudhrike, a name derived, significantly, together with many others in use by the native peoples of North America, from Old Norse. Being translated, it meant "Southern Kingdom" - the northern kingdom being, one has to assume, in Scandinavia or Iceland and Greenland. The French when they arrived called it Souriquois, but soon it was to become Acadia, possibly a contraction of Arcadia.

Spain and Portugal, England and Holland, all probably had El Dorado in mind, and the seven golden cities. They never found them and in time all the convoluted legends died.

Meanwhile, the "Auld Alliance" between France and Scotland, as well perhaps as Scotland's Norse connections in the past, had led to a Scottish presence in Acadia and a year after the Pilgrim Fathers landed in New England, New Scotland, comprising what are now Nova Scotia, Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick, part of Maine, Anticosti Island and the Gaspe Peninsula, appeared on the map under the conditions set out in the First Charter, dated 1621.

Nova Scotia then faced many years of turmoil, as in the rest of North and South America, caused mainly by what was going on in Europe. What finally happened was that in 1654 Cromwell's men, led by Sedgewick, invaded New Scotland or Acadia and carried out the same sort of systematic destruction of castles and other buildings as Cromwell had done in England. Gunpowder, the ultimate weapon of the time, was used to blow them up. The severe climate completed the task and soon little more than the foundations were left. This led to their existence in the past being denied later. Yet there is no doubt that the "castles and fortalices" as well as the "towns and manors" mentioned in the two charters of 1621 and 1625 actually existed, as did also the gold and other minerals mentioned. The Gold River runs through New Ross and other communities, and there are remains of old gold-mines. Ruins were found at Fort Point as well as at New Ross, which were obviously originally the foundations of buildings erected long before La Have became the French capital in 1632.

Legends back up what has been found on or beneath the surface of the ground. Gold was said to have been taken by Cromwell's men to New England.

In 1632 when for expediency's sake Charles I placed New Scotland under the French, who called it Acadia, the capital at La Have was at a place the native Micmacs called "Longshanks" and whose French name may be translated back into the Old Norse as Hop. Here, then, are two more links with the Norse sagas.

It was this anxiety on the part of the Stuart kings to keep English marauders out which accounted for the repeated "returning" of Nova Scotia to France. The Stuarts trusted the French; they did not find reason to trust the English even though they were trying to act as their rulers. Also involved was the gold trade, at the time in the hands of Scottish merchants. England's history was, from the Scottish point of view, one of usurpation and treachery. There were many secrets to be kept, such as the true extent of the early Norse voyages, the presence of old Norse merchant families in Scotland and, after the accession of James I to the English throne, in London; and the gold trade associated with them.

Even more interesting was the true identity of Scottish merchants of Norse descent: they were, according to Norwegian historian Fridtjof Nansen, originally from the Greeks of the Golden Age of Athens and Sparta. Arcadia or Acadia: the name was well-chosen as applied to the Sudhrike of those times. A good place to build a beautiful castle.

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A Castle Mound

1972: it was spring and our home on the balmy south-west shore of Nova Scotia was full of excitement and anticipation. After three years in the Loyalist town of Shelburne with its wonderful harbour for boating, we were moving to a more central location in connection with my husband's work. Our new home was to be on the road that runs from Chester Basin to Kentville in the Annapolis Valley. We'd often passed through the village of New Ross on the way to Wolfville for work or courses during the summer and had become accustomed to stopping there for lunch at the village snack bar. There was a hippie colony at a large, red house at the north end of the village. Once when our car had broken down they'd come along in their bus and had given us a lift. It seemed a friendly place and we were looking forward to living there. Remained only for us to find a house or apartment.

So one weekend, the weather being warm and sunny, we drove up there to make enquiries. It was only a small village, population not much more than 300. Would we be lucky enough to find a place? Somewhat to our surprise we discovered that two were available: a house for sale at the top of Porcupine Hill on the Old Annapolis Road - a military road dating back to the 18th century, long before the first settlers arrived after the Napoleonic wars, in 1816; and an apartment upstairs in that big house where the hippies lived.

The house on Porcupine Hill turned out to be unfinished, the basement full of large rocks and most of the rooms inside only partially partitioned off. It was within our price range but would enough work be done by the time we planned to move in? Worse yet was the very steep gradient of the hill. Wouldn't it be dangerous during winter? Well, there had been a few accidents but if you drove carefully.......

We decided to look at the apartment. The hippies had a rock band and we wondered if they would want to practise downstairs while we were trying to sleep upstairs. But no problem: they had moved out and the entire property - house and about three-quarters of an acre of grounds - was in the course of being sold. So we'd soon be getting a new landlord. We liked the apartment. It had been newly-renovated with panelled walls in the two main rooms, and the kitchen door led out on to a balcony from which a lovely view could be had of the valley below, where a stream ran and cattle grazed. And we could move in as soon as we liked.

While my husband was negotiating the rent with our new, if temporary, landlord, I went out to explore the grounds. Although it was sunny, there was a brisk, cool breeze and, unlike the South Shore, snow was still lying. I was glad I had my boots on. The spring run-off was underway and I had to leap over a little stream that ran across the backyard. Long grass, flattened by the snow, showed in brown patches here and there but soon gave way to a thick undergrowth of bushes, with two apple trees to the left and a straggly willow behind a camp-stove to the right. The landlord had pointed to an abandoned truck among the bushes: that marked the end of the backyard. But when I got there I discovered there was a steep drop and a footpath leading along what seemed to be the remains of a stone wall.

The men were still talking outside the back door. "Ronnie, Ronnie!" I called across the half-acre of snow that separated us, "Ronnie, come and look here! It's a castle mound!"

"It's a what!"

"It's a castle mound. You can see the line of the outer wall through the snow and the path runs round the remains of two towers! Come and look!"

But he remained motionless beside the tall, red house, gazing back at me across the white expanse: "No! Come here! I want to know what you think of the place. We've got a long drive home," he added, turning towards our little yellow car.

"But don't you want to look at the back land?" I exclaimed, starting to plunge back towards him through the undergrowth and snow, "It's so interesting. I mean it really could be the ruins of a castle." "Not in Canada," he replied, "Come on, let's go," and he opened the off-side door for me to get in. "Now," he said, "It's your decision. This place or the other?"

"Oh, I thought I told you. This place. Let's go back and tell him we'll buy it." "But we can't. Have you forgotten? This place is only for rent." "Never mind. Rent it then."

My husband obviously didn't share my enthusiasm and took pains to remind me that the other place was for sale, "And it's a bargain. We could easily finish it ourselves." Perhaps so. But it was obvious that a great deal of work would have to be done on it. The upper floor was not only unfinished - it hadn't even been begun. I visualised us facing the autumn under tarpaulins.

By now I had begun to realise that, as far as Ron was concerned, the castle I was sure I'd discovered was, if not pure fantasy, a lost cause. How could I convince him to change his mind? I launched into a discussion on all the advantages we'd have if we chose the upper apartment in the big, red house: the well-finished interior, the space for a garden, the proximity of the stores. And then there was that steep, winding hill leading up to the other place: bound to be hazardous in winter, I emphasized. Spring was starting now, and the roads were clear, but we'd already been warned about how deep the snow could be "up here" compared with what we'd been experiencing down on the balmy shores of south-west Nova Scotia.

So, although the apartment was also on a hill, it was settled and we were to move in at the end of June or early July. The hilltop on which the village itself was situated was approached by a road whose gradient was far less steep than that of Porcupine Hill, which was outside the village and on the way to another one known as The Forties.

"This is just about the highest point west of Halifax," we'd been told over the phone when we were arranging to view the properties. We remembered it not only as a stopping-place on the way to Annapolis Valley, but because of its Farm Museum, a fairly recent project that we'd visited the previous summer: a pretty little village with two white clapboard churches, to greet us: the Anglican on the left and the Catholic on the right.

"The highest point west of Halifax..." Now where had I heard that phrase before? No matter. It was to be our home now, with woodsmen as our neighbours and a large Christmas-tree operation next door instead of the fishermen we'd grown used to and the local fish-plant. Huge logging trucks would go rumbling through the village, while in Shelburne the main activity was down at the wharf.

But what was the significance of "the highest point west of Halifax?" Fortunately I was in the habit of keeping notebooks. Soon I would discover the connection. But for the time being I had to put the nagging question out of my mind: my notebooks were already packed.

Slowly, almost leisurely, during the long, warm days of our last few weeks on the South Shore, I packed our things into the seven trunks that had accompanied us on our travels around the world: England, then back to Western Canada where Ron had grown up: a home for a while on the Prairies; Japan, Vietnam, Singapore; another home for a while in India where we were engaged in social work; then back again to Nova Scotia, where once again we had begun to collect a few pieces of furniture. We needed a home of our own now rather than just a rented apartment and hoped that at New Ross, once we'd settled into the community, we'd be able to find a place to buy. For my part I hoped for a miracle: I hoped that the man who was negotiating to buy the big house with the red shingles would withdraw.

In July we moved in, and at once the neighbours opposite came to introduce themselves and to offer to help. From them we discovered that the place had been built just after the last war as a restaurant, which accounted for its "boomtown" false front. Buses used to stop there and when they were discontinued the restaurant had fallen on hard times. No longer was it the village meeting-place: along the newly-paved road from Chester Basin to Kentville in the Annapolis Valley the cars whizzed by, their occupants eager to arrive at their destination before thinking of a snack or a meal. Even the popular dances once held there became less and less frequent: television was partly responsible for that; and soon, like the village theatre, the restaurant was forced to close down. More and more, local people were staying at home to watch TV.

For a time the lower part was used as a tire store, while the upper apartment passed through the hands of various tenants including the hippie rock group who for a time brought back some of the old colour and excitement. But now the landlord, who had bought the property in a tax sale, felt he lived too far away to keep an eye on the place. That was why he had arranged to sell it, and our new landlord would be living in the lower apartment, he told us, which was being converted. The noise of hammer, saw and electric drill greeted us as we moved in, assailing us via the furnace-ducts, and we wondered what it would be like with a family downstairs if the sounds of what went on there travelled upwards so easily. One night our present landlord held a party down there and we were kept awake most of the night.

Ron began to make enquiries about an alternative property. New Ross was so well situated that wherever he worked in mainland Nova Scotia, a home there would serve his purpose. Moreover, he'd have to retire one day and what better place than this area with its rivers and lakes and the beautiful views from our hilltop? Although it was not on the coast, it was handy to the sea and to the many islands of Mahone Bay not twenty miles down the road, including the fabled Oak Island and its mysterious treasure-pit which we had yet to visit. Some said the Incas had hidden their gold there long ago. But by all accounts there had apparently been plenty of gold mined locally at one time. Why else was our river called the Gold River?

Despite my fascination with our new surroundings, I was at first so busy settling in with Ron and our three cats that all thoughts of a castle, if any, on the site have been shelved. Outside a crop of weeds three feet high had grown where I wanted to start a garden and the few plants we'd brought with us such as columbines, Cape gooseberries and violets had to be temporarily heeled in and weren't at all happy. So the landlord, at our request, sent a student with a scythe to mow our backyard in his spare time. Even so, there was a lot of scrub left, and among it to the north-west of the house, just behind the camp-stove I could now see what appeared to be the remains of a second vehicle: the shiny black top of a car. Beyond it, to the north, the drop was even steeper than the one at the far end of our yard, so that we actually looked down on the roofs of buildings in the Christmas-tree yard. Bashing my way towards what I'd just found, I discovered to my surprise that it was sitting on top of what I was almost certain was a disused well, though if so, being in such an elevated position, it must have dried up long ago. It was eight feet in diameter, and if it really was a well I wondered what house it had served, for clearly it was older than the existing house, which in any case had its own drilled well and electrically-operated pump.

I told Ron about my find and he said that if it was indeed a well he would make a wooden cover for it in case some wandering child should fall in.

Meanwhile I was working on the garden and it was while I was doing so that I came across my first clues as to an earlier building, part of which was in our backyard, and it was not, as it happened, a castle.

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Tales the Micmacs Told: the King's Refuge in the Woods

During the rest of that summer, everything seemed to be conspiring to prevent me from working in my garden, not only the unpacking but also a new and interesting community and county - Lunenburg County - to explore and more history to learn. First, there was that old 18th-century military road, originally planned to go from the old capital at Annapolis Royal to what was then a military base at Halifax, now the capital. Part of it had been paved and, crossing the Gold River at New Ross, turned right up a dirt road for a little way, then continued along a rough track to the left. That section, which we walked as far as possible, led towards Halifax but was never completed. Accompanying us on this walk was one of the students and it was he who first mentioned a 17th-century mansion that once stood behind our new home. He suggested that the rocks that had been making my gardening so difficult might be part of its foundations.

"My grandfather says it was somewhere up this road," he said, "Right in the middle of the forest in those days. An ancestor of his worked on it as a carpenter. My grandmother's people were connected with it too: one of her ancestors had a hand in pulling it down in 1654 for Cromwell. You see there was a lot of gold - a gold dome. It was all taken down to Massachusetts by Sedgewick........"

Some of this student's ancestors had lived in Nova Scotia for a very long time: they were Micmacs. And that reminded me of where I'd heard mention of "the highest point west of Halifax": it was an elderly Micmac who had first told us that.

Back in Shelburne County we had discovered several abandoned roads as well as the more common woods roads and had often enjoyed hiking in the Barrington, Shelburne and Lockeport areas, accompanied by friends we'd made nearby. Although the woods roads often yielded interesting botanical specimens, it was the abandoned roads that had all the 'atmosphere" and we often found ourselves instinctively lowering our voices or lapsing into silence as if we had to tread carefully lest we disturbed the ghosts of the past. Highwaymen had infested some of those roads in days gone by, and from time to time we would come upon the ruins of a roadside inn once busy with travellers, stage-coaches and horses; or, set back a little, what was once a pioneer homestead with perhaps a gnarled old apple-tree or two nearby still bearing fruit. It was easy to imagine ourselves back in those days, and to experience some of the ever-present fear people must have had lest at any moment a highwayman might leap out of the bushes.

Shelburne, the Loyalist town that had once exceeded Halifax in size, boasted one of the best harbours along the entire North American east coast and had vied with Halifax as the capital of Nova Scotia, has its own old Annapolis Road. It was here that we came upon a little log cabin on the shores of a lake where lived, on occasion, an elderly hunter. The first time we went there he was away, but we noted that it had all that a family would need: wood-shed, outhouse, camp-stove and well - even a dog-kennel; and behind it a little landing-stage. Peeping through the windows, we could see hunting trophies such as moose-antlers and bear-skins.

Next time we were lucky: just as we were about to push on, one of the students who had accompanied us scanned the lake and called us back. We turned to see a small boat making its way towards us across the still waters. It had two occupants, an old man, tall and spare and stooping a little as he came ashore, and a man in his thirties who turned out to be his son.

Indoors, we noticed that he had a lot of things still in use that would now be considered antiques: old oil-lamps, candle-moulds, a rotary egg-whisk over a hundred years old.

But it was the stories he told that interested us most: how he'd taken to the woods at the age of fifteen, establishing his camp, adding rooms to his original one-roomed cabin. "They didn't like it though. They tried to get me out. The government," he added, "They even tried to sell me my own land. But they couldn't do that any more than they could get me out. This land belonged to my people long before Halifax was ever heard of."

By "my people" I thought he meant his own family. We didn't discover until afterwards that he was a Micmac.

"Yes," he continued, "And there was the Queen to back me up. Our land: they call it Crown land and it stretches right across the middle of the province, starting at Yarmouth. Long ago the Queen and them, or the King, whoever it was at the time, reserved it in case they had to come and live here... It was a long time ago... I don't know, perhaps before Bonaparte."

"How do you know about all this?" I asked, fascinated.

"My people were here when it happened," he replied.

It was all because of the royal family, according to him, that the authorities had failed to get him out: "The deeds were indefensible - useless and meaningless if the original deeds turned up."

I asked him what he thought might have happened to the original deeds and whose they were.

"The royal family had them and now they're lost. That's why any other deeds are indefensible."

I was puzzled: how could the royal family have lost the deeds of their own Crown land? And which British kings around the time of Napoleon had been under such threat that they might have to take refuge in Nova Scotia? Then it occurred to me: this story must have come down from much longer ago. Of course: it was the Stuart kings who had been faced with all those problems. It was James I of England who had given Nova Scotia its first Charter and it was James II who had run away as William III sailed in from Holland to claim the throne. Perhaps he had hoped to get to Nova Scotia and had taken the deeds with him to France along with other papers. Naturally, later on, the Hanoverian kings would have regarded them as lost.

Later we had met another Micmac who was much younger. He lived at Barrington and used to act as our guide through the woods there. He knew the footprints of every animal in the woods and could even tell the sex of an animal from them. I marvelled at the way he could creep up on some small creature such as a chipmunk without making a sound even though there were dead leaves and twigs underfoot.

Next time we met, I mentioned the story the old man had told and he replied, "So you've heard about that. Yes, it's true. There was such a king and he had all this land for hunting and in case he had to come back here from England. It reached from somewhere near Yarmouth to Lake Pockwock, this side of Halifax, and in the middle of the forest a house had been built for him, a little palace in the woods." "But," he added with an emphasis that reminded me of the older man, "we have a right to live on that land and no government can turn us off it. We can go into the woods and build our log cabins and they can't stop us. We have the right by those old deeds."

He added that he himself was building a cabin in the woods.

I asked him where in the woods the little palace had been built and he told me, "West of Halifax - just about the highest point west of Halifax, on a hill. I can't tell you exactly where." But he was sure there would be some ruins on the spot, adding, "It was built on holy ground. It was to be the King's refuge." I assumed he meant holy to the Micmacs.

Now, a year or two later, a student was telling me about his grandfather's story concerning what seemed to be the same palace.

Meanwhile, my wish about our new home had come true: the man who was hoping to buy it had not been satisfied with the renovations downstairs and had withdrawn, so we had immediately agreed to take it off our landlord's hands. I was hardly surprised when the deeds arrived and indicated that the land was not freehold but subject to a grant given by George III. The two Micmacs had been right: our deeds were indefensible. We wondered what would happen if the old deeds suddenly turned up. If they had disappeared with James II, perhaps it wouldn't matter as his son and grandson had apparently left no descendants and the line had therefore died out. But what if, as the younger Micmac had implied, another king had been involved - a king of Nova Scotia? What if his descendants were to lay claim to our property? But our neighbours told us not to worry: many of them were descended from the original settlers, all disbanded soldiers who had been granted land in the New Ross area around 1816 - and nothing untoward had happened since.

So I continued with my efforts to make a garden in our backyard, wondering the while where exactly the "little palace" had stood. I had been removing piles of rocks from my little garden plot, but so far hadn't come across anything that might be called masonry.

One day I had to ask Ron to come and help me to remove some particularly heavy and stubborn rocks. As he dug them out, I noticed that four of them seemed to have been deliberately grouped around a hole. It was only when I came upon another group exactly similar that I knew we'd just dug up, as it were, a post-hole! Even so, I was not certain that these were part of the foundations of any building. There was no sign of any mortar for instance. We asked the student who had been helping us, the one with the tale about the little palace.

 
A post hole: one at each corner

"Mortar? There wouldn't be," he said, "This was a 'base-frame' house. My grandfather's people used to have the old plans but they went to the United States with some other relatives, he says. The posts were fixed at the corners and they held up the frame. Then the rest of the foundations could be quite rough, just rocks." In other words the palace had been built on the basis of an ordinary, old-fashioned frame house. That came as a surprise to me as I had expected it to be of stone, there being plenty of stones available in and around the village. But I soon learnt that the severe winter weather and the acidity of the soil would have caused serious problems if mortar was used; which was why all the houses around there were clapboard or shingled.

What I wanted to do now was to get one of our two original informants who knew about the 17th-century house to come and take a look at the site. The older man was now not in good health, but I felt sure that our Barrington friend would pay us a visit if asked. So I sent out an invitation. I was also hoping to meet the student's grandfather, but he too was in poor health. However, his grandson did let me have a rough sketch-plan of the wing of the mansion that appeared to have stood on our land. It was, as it turned out, highly inaccurate, if only because he had failed to indicate where the rest of the building was - whether farther back or extending on to the land next door. Thus it was that while our student was away on his long vacation, I spent some time wondering how a "mansion" or a "palace" could have been so small; for the sketch-plan plainly indicated that the place was only fourteen feet wide. Did the two arrows pointing towards the backyard next door mean that we could expect to find more rubble foundations running in that direction?

To my delight, the entire family from Barrington arrived complete with tent, to camp in our backyard and to attend the local fair that was on at the time, for which the entire community had been preparing for some weeks past and where both Ron and I were manning side-shows.

Our young Micmac was tall, bronzed and auburn-haired: it simply isn't true that they are all dark. In Nova Scotia fair, auburn or even red hair are not uncommon. When I told him that the village was once called "The Cross", he gave me a knowing look and told me, "You won't find that name in the official county history." The name, he said, dated back to the days before New Ross was founded.

He was right. It seemed to be an entirely local name still in use colloquially, but not on any map or in any book. I wondered how it had originated, for although there was now a cross-roads in the village where the Old Annapolis Road crossed that running from Chester Basin to Kentville, it certainly hadn't been there in the 18th century or even during the first half of this century, for the marshland that lay to the south of the two churches had forced all traffic to take a detour down the Old Annapolis Road, over the Gold River and then right up the hill to continue towards Chester Basin.

The causeway that now crossed the marshland had been built only a few years before we first travelled that way.

"Yes," said the young man, "I guess you've found the place."

 

I was anxious to learn more, for instance what had really been meant by "The Cross" at a time when there were no cross-roads in the village? I was reminded of Britain and Ireland, where that name was often used in reference to an actual cross that had been erected in a village. Had there been such a cross in whatever community had preceded the foundation of New Ross?

 

But he was giving me one of those knowing looks again, and then he clammed up. Obviously he knew more. Perhaps he would tell later.

 

But alas, he was never to visit us again: within a few months he was killed in a shooting accident. This was to prove a great blow to me in my investigations, for my other two possible informants were in their late seventies or eighties and wouldn't be able to give me much more assistance. In the end, the young student would be the only one of my original contacts left alive to help. Fortunately he was almost as interested in what we'd found out as I was.

 

There are roughly three kinds of stone cross in the British Isles. The first kind but the most recently-erected is the Christian cross, based on the wooden one on which Christ was crucified. Then there is what is known as the Celtic cross, found mainly in Ireland and dating back to the early days of the Christian era. It is basically a stele or stone pillar with an elaborately-decorated cross carved, often on all four sides, at the top. Unable to discover whether there had been any settlement at what is now New Ross before 1816, I wondered whether one or other of these Christian crosses might have been erected at this spot on the Old Annapolis Road, perhaps as a grave-marker. If so, the first kind would have been more likely as it was conceivable that there might have been one or more fatal accidents during the building of the road in the 18th century.

 

The Celtic cross is linked with the third kind, sometimes referred to as the pagan "cross". When Christianity first came to Ireland, the phallic symbols connected with the old religion were often "Christianised" by means of the aforementioned elaborate carving, though no doubt others that were similar were carved and erected by the Christians. In England a few of the old pagan steles remain almost unchanged, perhaps "Christianised" by means of roughly-carved crosses near the top or by chipping away the stone to form a stumpy cross-piece.

 

Since these pagan steles date back to long before the Christian era I concluded that it was very unlikely that such a "cross" ever existed in Nova Scotia.

 

It would be two years before I would discover any evidence of a stone cross at New Ross. Yet as it happened the evidence was there from the day we had our property surveyed.

 

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Now It Was Ours

The sudden change from renters to ownership in August, 1972, had been dramatic. It all began one day early in the month when I was outside at the front of the house digging to make a flower-bed when the landlord happened to drop by to collect another month's rent. At least that was what I thought. Unfortunately Ron was out.

"Bad news," said the landlord as he greeted me. I wondered if he was going to raise the rent and suggested he might come back a little later, by which time Ron would have returned. But he seemed to ignore that and continued, "I shall have to tell those men downstairs to stop work: the buyer has withdrawn. Doesn't like the way they've divided it up, says there's no room for a double bed, doesn't like the open-plan idea, says there aren't enough windows where he wants them. Well, he could put them in afterwards, couldn't he? But he's gone now and to tell you the truth I don't want the place. It's always given me trouble, vandals and that. Too far away, can't keep an eye on it. Why, those rock-band people and hippies I had up here turned it into a regular whore-house. Then they gave up work and threw the piano downstairs and wouldn't pay the rent. I don't want anything like that again. Would you be willing to buy?"

"Perhaps," I replied, not wanting to appear too eager. I told him I'd consult my husband.

"Good enough. I'll be back in a couple of days," he told me, and with that he got into his truck and was away.

At first Ron thought the asking price was too high, and I agreed. "But he'll come down," I assured him, "He seems fed up with the bad luck he's had with the place. He's desperate to sell."

We were somewhat concerned about the unfinished work downstairs and arranged for him to come over with the keys so that we could inspect. I was anxious to dig deeper in the backyard and to discover the full extent of the ruins. The ground was full of humps and bumps and in any case would have to be levelled so that we could make a lawn. I felt sure I'd discover more foundations in the course of that work.

But all my work outside came to an abrupt end on the day we inspected the lower half of the house. There was a tremendous amount of work to be done. Our landlord still seemed unable to understand why the other man, who had been willing to pay more, had withdrawn, but when he flung open the door to what he said was the master-bedroom we understood everything: there was no clothes-closet and barely enough room even for a single bed! In fact everything downstairs seemed to have been made awkward to live in: it was really still a dance-hall with only one light-switch that turned all the lights on everywhere at the same time, and no screens to keep the bugs out in the summer or storm-windows for the winter. Perhaps, too, the noise problem had been a factor in the buyer's withdrawal. During his visits he must have been able to hear everything we were doing upstairs: singing for instance, which was one of our pastimes. We'd put on our Newfoundland, Scottish and other folk-song records and sing along merrily as we worked to settle in.

I observed that we could use downstairs as a rec-room and now that we had the house to ourselves would be able to invite our singing friends up from the South Shore for the weekends. But by this time we were in the basement and Ron could see endless work to be done there, especially on the plumbing; and then again, outside there were no eaves-troughs. The newly-installed oil-fired furnace was an asset, but when we learnt that there were sometimes power-cuts in the winter lasting for as long as an entire day, we realised we'd have to look for a wood-burning stove to use in case of emergency. Fortunately there was a brick chimney with an opening for such a stove on every floor.

The outcome of all this was that within three days we had become joint grantees on a small part of that land described to us by the Micmacs we'd met around Shelburne and Barrington.

My one thought, once we had completed the work needed on the house, was to trace the boundaries of our land so that I knew where to dig. In the end we were able to arrange to have it surveyed. Meanwhile, from the deeds we discovered that it had been originally L-shaped but a piece in front had been sold off by the people who ran the restaurant and was now planted with a few silver poplars under which the horses belonging to the children there were grazing. There being no fence, I had at first imagined that our property still extended on to that land and had been planning to dig there. We soon realised we'd have to fence our land in when the horses started to wander over to our house and peep in at the downstairs windows.

At the far end, where the "L" turned southwards and came to an end, the deeds mentioned, surprisingly, a stone wall - a rare thing in Nova Scotia. Scrambling through the bushes, I found this wall: it was almost entirely obscured by a growth of alder saplings and brambles, where large, luscious blackberries were by that time ripening; there were raspberries, too, and choke cherries. At the far end of the wall a number of huge rocks had been dumped by a neighbour who later came and apologized for what he had done but never removed them. A crab-apple tree grew there and a hop-vine had twisted itself around its trunk. I wondered if the people living in the 17th-century mansion had originally planted hops there to make beer. Continuing with my rock-climbing activities, I discovered on the other side of the wall the remains of other walls attached to the main wall at right-angles. Rooms? Stables? No, too small. Privies perhaps.

Next day we had a few people coming in for supper. Then we had to start work on our newly-acquired rooms and basement. So no more exploration, no more digging for a while.

We did, however, take a day off to search out the old deeds at the county offices. From this we were able to ascertain who all the grantees had been from the date of the original grant in 1816 when the village was founded under the name of Sherbrooke, and how the land was subsequently sub-divided. It was all very interesting but of course as far as we could see threw no light on any earlier land use or buildings.

But what we did learn was that when the restaurant people bought the land in 1948, there were already "buildings" on it. For some time it had been part of a one-and-a-half acre lot belonging to the house next door, where a fur-trader then lived. On making enquiries among our older neighbours we eventually discovered that this man had used the then one-storey building on the site of our present house as a store where he apparently also sold "antiques" - this latter we discovered when a man who had been away ever since the war returned looking for antiques at our address. It was probably a junk-shop but no matter: what would really matter to me in my later research was the fur-trading post which I was to learn was already there before the present village was founded and had been in operation, apparently, for centuries. Here, then, was another Micmac connection to the days at least just after the razing of the site in 1654, if not earlier.

Now we had to get down to work in earnest: not so much outside, even though the weather was good, for long weeks of dry weather had made the ground, which was of heavy clay, rock-hard and very difficult to dig. For the moment, hours of scrubbing and cleaning, in particular to get those awful black tire marks off the floor while Ron and others attended to the plumbing, the electrical wiring and the purchase and installation of such necessary items as storm windows and eaves-troughs.

Every night we went to bed tired out after our labours and all the extra meals I had to prepare. But how good it was to wake up in the morning, look out of the window and see cows grazing in the meadow below: a peaceful scene, life as I knew it years ago on the farm where I was born.

It would be September before I could do any digging again: later in that month as it happened.

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A Stone Marked with a Cross and a Scottish Connection

September and the Labour Day holiday on the 5th; but, anxious though I was to get back to work afterwards in the backyard, the ground remained too hard and I had to content myself completing the work on the furniture we'd bought for our extra rooms downstairs: covers to be made, curtains to be hung and so on. At last rain came in the form of the tail-end of a tropical storm on the 9th and that meant I could at last get back to my digging.

Once again I went over the terrain. The little ditch that traversed the yard not far from the house was now running like a stream again. It had evidently been made to prevent water from the higher ground from running into the basement when the snow melted in the spring or, as in this case, after a summer rain-storm. Now we had it roughly bridged in three places with old boards we'd found around the place so that when the time came we could cross it with a lawn-mower. There was a good stretch of potential lawn to the left, as far as the line of loosely-packed rocks we'd found between the post-holes. This was roughly level with the well among the bushes to the far right, the large boulder behind the camp-stove and the home-made, benchless picnic table where the hippies had obviously used large logs as seats as several of these were scattered nearby. On that side, the ditch ran out across the boundary-line on to the neighbouring property where the horses grazed. It was there in the ditch that I found a strange-looking piece of heavy cast-iron piping, the same diameter as a house down-pipe at one end, where it had been broken off, but fixed with an iron band to an apparently much larger pipe at the other end, also broken off, the whole being about seven inches long.

I puzzled about this odd-looking piece of piping for years after finding it. What could it possibly have been used for? It seemed too heavy to have been attached to our wooden, shingled house. I didn't imagine it could be very old, otherwise it would have rusted away. I made a sketch of it and for a time forgot about it. Years later it occurred to me to follow the lines of the larger part in my sketch and the result amazed me. The curves in its construction indicated a roughly spherical shape rather than that of a larger pipe, and what I now saw was a primitive bomb which could be filled with gunpowder and a fuse led into it through the narrower pipe end. This bomb fragment must have been lying there ever since Cromwell's men blew the place up in 1654.

A few rocks lay scattered beyond the ditch on that side of the property, but beyond the camp-stove they lay thickly, both large and small, among the bushes. Only one relatively small area in that part, roughly rectangular, was free of rocks and bushes, a sort of mini-clearing. I wondered if a small wooden building had once stood there, a shed of some sort.

Ron, interested in making a lawn, was anxious to get rid of a few rocks scattered on the other side, level with the table. In particular there were two central to the "verandah" described by the grandfather of the student who was showing so much interest in what we had found. A better description would be "portico", for they had said there were six marble pillars across the front, surmounted by an arch built in the Palladian style. One of these rocks, round and flat, was obviously too large to move, but the other, a little nearer our house, was smaller and I thought we'd be able to get it out quite easily. I promised Ron I'd take some time off from my fight against the masses of burdocks near the house and dig it out for him while he was away at work.

That evening after he came home the two of us stood staring down on what to us was a mystery: a large, flat, roughly circular piece of stone lying at an angle so that until now most of its surface had been covered; and on it was a deeply-carved cross. It was not a stele: it was too broad for that. But since it had obviously been "Christianised" like so many such stones on the other side of the Atlantic, we could only conclude that Europeans had been crossing the Atlantic much earlier than even the Norsemen and that they had probably established, if not a settlement, then a place of worship on our hilltop.

This find put an entirely new complexion on the whole question of how long our hilltop had been used and for what purposes. There was just a slight possibility that this stone was a grave-marker, but when I finally examined other stones both on our property and on the adjacent hilltop behind the Anglican church and rectory, much larger than ours and flat enough to be used as a cow-pasture, I become convinced that New Ross had once been a centre of pagan worship.

If what we had found was indeed a pagan stone, we wondered if anything else had been carved on it, but it was too heavy and deeply embedded for us to find out. All we could do was to cover it in again and wait until the time when we had the people - and the tools - to help us get it out.

Meanwhile, since I'd dug up the grass around it, I made a little circular flower-bed there ready for planting with annuals in the spring.

Site of 17th century mansion partially uncovered as it started to snow Autumn 1972.
Small knob, left foreground, is "headless statue".
 

Once again, now, I found myself puzzling over what we had found. I knew a certain amount about standing stones, having travelled in Britain and Europe, but this one didn't seem to remind me of anything I'd seen before.

In any case I had all the usual misconceptions about such peoples as the Phoenicians and the Celts, whose activities I'd been told had been confined to the opposite side of the Atlantic. It was only when I began to find references in books to inscriptions in Ogam that I realized that the Celts must after all have crossed the Atlantic - possibly using the legendary sunken Atlantis or the mysterious island of Frisland as a stepping-stone; and that what we had in our backyard might date back to at least 800 B.C.

Halfway through September our visitors were mainly students we'd known while we were at Shelburne on their way to one of the universities at either Halifax or Wolfville. New Ross was a convenient stopping-off place for them, to see how we were doing in our new home and drink a cup of coffee with us. Some of them had been to Scotland on a student exchange scheme and were full of stories about how they'd stood on the little bit of Nova Scotian soil in Edinburgh Castle yard where from 1625 onwards Charles I had arranged for the baronets of Nova Scotia to be knighted.

"But they keep quiet about it," remarked one of them, "They'd never have pointed it out to us on the tour if we hadn't asked about it." True, for I'd visited Edinburgh Castle more than once and had never been told about it. To back his statement up, he produced a picture-postcard of the castle yard showing, amongst other features, the commemorative plaque. Yet the "blurb" on the back of the card didn't mention it. They were puzzled and one of them asked the guide why they were keeping so quiet about it, they said; and he replied, "Because of the Jacobites. We in Scotland all know the truth and talk about it among ourselves. We'll tell anybody about it who asks but nobody ever puts it in writing." In schools over there, nothing is ever taught about Nova Scotia and its Scottish connections and many children leaving school still don't know that it exists.

But Ron was interrupting: "Jacobites? In these days?" He exclaimed incredulously. But I could believe it. I'd seen a public house once in England, quite freshly-painted, with a notice on its outside wall, "No gypsies or Jacobites served here". Old causes die hard, the more so in Scotland as well as in Ireland where to this day Protestants and Catholics continue to fight over something that happened at the time of the Reformation. The last time I was anywhere near Glencoe, too, I saw a notice over the door of a small restaurant: "No Campbells served here". The last time there was a Jacobite scare involving Buckingham Palace was in the reign of George V, in my own lifetime. Yet the Jacobites were finally defeated at Culloden in 1746.

Nova Scotia received both its Charters from the first two Stuart kings of England. I was already convinced that the site we'd found in our backyard was connected in some way with the Stuart kings. What I couldn't understand, however, was why in 1972 the authorities on the other side of the Atlantic should be so worried about an issue so long dead. To me, as to us all, Nova Scotia was part of Canada: its history - English, French, Scottish, Norse, Micmac, and possibly Celtic and Phoenician, was purely of academic interest and the politics of 1621 had little if any bearing on today's conditions.

The student with the interesting grandfather had tried to get the various guides and officials they'd met in Scotland to talk. He mentioned the tract of land once owned by the Scottish kings. "Yes," replied the guide in question, "And there was an old road leading right through it to the old capital; and at the highest point a house was built for Charles I..... It was there all right but nobody ever mentions it now, only those of us who still believe in The Cause. It was pulled down and all sold to America. Beautiful marble pillars. I wonder what became of them." He said that after being built in 1623, it was vacated in or about 1630 or 1632.

I was amazed that this story, coming from Scotland, tallied so exactly with what we'd been able to discover in Nova Scotia. In the meantime, I'd met another descendant of Theodore Jennings, the man who had a hand in pulling it down, and she had told me the same story about the demolition, adding one new point: "There were twelve marble pillars in all and if you go down to Boston you'll find them on the State House there along with the gold dome." I didn't have to go: I'd already been and had a photograph. I got it out and counted. Yes, there were, as I'd just been told, twelve marble pillars. And I now knew that, to allow for them, the 17th-century house behind our modern one must have extended across the backyard next door.

But who had been sent over to design such a large mansion and supervise the building of it? The obvious candidate for this was Inigo Jones. Now I must try to discover whether he remained at the court of James I in London during the years the place was being built. It wasn't long before I was able to discover that he had indeed been absent from London during the years between 1621 and 1630 - nine years; and that seven ships in all had been sent over with materials in connection with the building.

I now knew beyond all reasonable doubt that it was Inigo Jones who had been sent by James I to act as architect in the building of perhaps more than one important edifice in Nova Scotia, including the "little mansion" with gold dome and two porticoes behind our home and the house next door. And I fought my way through the undergrowth on the rough ground behind its backyard and was able to locate the exact position of the other portico.

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Two Hilltops and a Norse Connection

But what of the castle I'd been sure had once stood on our property and those of neighbours all along the road as far as the gas-station near the Anglican church? I hadn't forgotten it: many times I'd walked the ridge of what I believed had been the wall between the two towers. But the area bounded by that wall was completely overgrown with almost impenetrable vegetation. Moreover, the land there was not ours but formed part of one or two of the furthermost backyards. This made it difficult to investigate and I decided to wait and see if I could find any further evidence of a castle on our own part of the site. But I was fairly certain that the 17th-century house whose foundations we'd found had been built within the walls of an earlier castle.

Beyond the "castle" area, however, was that other hilltop, slightly higher, much more extensive and almost completely flat. Although it was now used as a cow-pasture, many of the rocks that had been cleared off it and dumped at the sides or at the edge of the woods beyond appeared to me as if they had been worked by man; and some of them had strange markings on them that didn't seem to be due to weathering.

I would come back to investigate this area later, in the light of other discoveries I was to make on our own little hilltop. But for the time being I was left with another puzzle: why had people sometime in the past gone to the trouble of flattening this hilltop so completely? And what building had once stood on the site of its only feature, what appeared to be the ruins of an abandoned basement or cellar? Had a Micmac village once stood there, whose wooden, hut-like buildings had all disappeared without trace except the one, much larger, central building that had a basement? The land hadn't been flattened by the New Ross settlers for agricultural purposes: from all the enquiries I had been able to make, nothing had ever grown there except grass since the village was founded, apart from the few Christmas trees that were now being planted at the end nearest to us.

I had wondered at first whether there had been some sort of an administrative centre there in connection with the 17th-century mansion, but most of the people I asked suggested "an Indian settlement". Certainly our own backyard had been used by the Micmacs: I'd already confirmed that when by chance I began to find arrow-heads as I was digging, one of them serrated and others in various stages of completion. I'd dug up other stone tools, some of them quite large, but what they had been used for was uncertain. One might have been a net-weight used for fishing; others were I scrapers used in connection with the fur trade.

I had no idea how old the stone implements were that I was finding; I could approximately date the arrow-heads by reference to books on the subject: all seemed to be fairly modern - that is, later than the 17th-century. I was looking for something that could be carbon-dated but all I could find were what seemed to be spigots and a number of spruce-knots that had been split at the pointed end. I couldn't imagine what they might have been used for until an American visitor who happened to be an archaeologist suggested that they were used as primitive clamps to hold hot metal while it was being worked: "small articles," he suggested. I at once thought of gold. Had there been a goldsmith's shop within the castle walls? But then I dismissed the idea: they didn't look very old even though I'd found them up to a foot underground near where the ditch ran.

When an opportunity arose much later to have some of the artifacts I'd dug up carbon-dated, these two examples were the only wooden tools I had to offer. So now we knew they were about 600-1,000 c.14 years older than the 1950s. Even though c.14 years do not exactly correspond to calendar years, these results were far better than I'd expected. Now I knew that the site had been in use as early as the days of the Norsemen. I thought of the Norse sagas. What if the "grapes" Leif Erikson had found had really been gold? It was a fact that he became very wealthy after his voyage to what he called Vinland and that he subsequently acquired the nickname of "Leif the Lucky". I tracked down various versions of the relevant sagas and concluded that although the site recently excavated at L'Anse aux Meadows on the Great Northern Peninsula of Newfoundland was obviously where he and others had established themselves, La Have may well have been the "Hop" (pronounced "Hope") or land-locked harbour where, according to the sagas, he had landed during his explorations of the Atlantic coastline. The Norsemen favoured this type of harbour because they could sail in at high tide and then be safe at low tide. There are still enough sand-bars around La Have to provide such a safe harbour if it were needed. The term hope was still being used in this sense in the late 17th century when Pepys wrote his diary, but with modern shipping it seems to have died out as far as the English language is concerned. When I visited Norway, however, I found it still in use there with the original spelling, without the terminal "e".

There is also a place called Hope on the northern coast of Scotland in the county of Sutherland. At first when I visited the area I was puzzled that one of Scotland's northernmost counties bore a name that meant "South land". The explanation was that until the Treaty of Perth in 1266 it was, together with the Hebrides, part of the old Norse kingdom and, being administered from Norway, had formed its southernmost limits.

Not surprisingly, Leif Erikson had passed that way, too: it was in the Hebrides that, according to the sagas, he met Thorgunna, who was to become the mother of his only son and so, with him, founded a dynasty of sorts.

Near Hope, on an island, are the ruins of a castle. The whole area had an air of desolation enough to fill any visitor with awe. Something terrible must have happened there to have caused all the people, like those living in the castle to abandon their homes, all of which were likewise in ruins. "The cruel clearances," a local man explained, "After Culloden it was all sold... They just knocked down the houses over people's heads.... Some were killed. At the end only a few shepherds were left. Now even the sheep are gone." The first settlers, who had given the place its name, had built the castle, the man said, and their descendants had lived there ever since: "1792, the Year of the Sheep. They took the roof off the castle so that when they returned they wouldn't have to pay back taxes. But they never came back and nobody ever knew what became of them. They had ships.... They just sailed away and disappeared."

The Norse connection: I came across it again in New Brunswick when I was asking an Acadian family about the expulsion from Nova Scotia around 1755. They said that their ancestors had been taken by the British to France. But later they had returned to New Brunswick along with a shipload of their compatriots. I wondered how they had managed to mount such an exodus, many of them being penniless after all they had been through. To my astonishment they told me the voyage hadn't cost them a penny: they had been rescued and brought back "by a Viking ship". Vikings, they said, from Scotland.

They had no explanation as to why those who performed this gallant rescue described themselves as "Vikings". But doubtless they were originally descended from them. Could be they were operating out of Hope in Sutherland.

Now, as I continued digging, I thought of many such things as these. I thought of the Micmacs who had called La Have, or Hop, Pijelooeekak or "Having long joints" - Longshanks, a fair description of any Norseman. Anyone who has seen pictures of the Norse burial-ground at Brattahlid, Erik the Red's home in Greenland, will know that all that family had very long legs.

If La Have was indeed one of the "hops" visited by Leif Erikson and Thorfinn Karlsefni, might they not also have come inland later to establish a gold-mine?

During that winter and those that ensued I not only had a chance to read more on the various aspects of what we were finding at New Ross, but found time to write to others working on similar sites elsewhere.

Clamps made from spruce knots, used by goldsmiths to hold hot metal while it was being worked. Estimated at 600-1,000 years old, found behind our house.

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Burning-Off - and a Viking Sword-Tip

In spring a strange madness infects most of rural Nova Scotia. After the snow has disappeared, the spring run-off is monitored carefully: a few encouragingly warm days and a puff of smoke is seen on the horizon or, worse, in a neighbouring backyard, sending any gardeners unlucky enough to be down-wind scurrying indoors. Presently another puff of smoke will appear, and another: it's time for the spring burn-off. Fire-fighters are mildly disapproving of the practice and there is a provincial cut-off date in mid-April every year which only adds to the frenzy while it lasts. Soon the wailing of fire-sirens will be heard across the land as the trucks race to douse a blazing backyard or to the aid of a farmer who has failed to move his tractor in time. Whole families go out at such times to beat around the edges of the designated area and prevent the fire from spreading. Every year in some cases this fails, the trucks don't get there in time and a man perishes trying to save a beloved old family Massey-Harris or a newly-installed mobile home.

Despite all this there is a reason behind this particular form of spring fever. It probably dates back to pioneer days when settlers discovered that a