IT'S SAGA SATURDAY!! Please welcome One More Chapter author, Adrienne Chinn...

Newfoundland’s Colourful Outports

In my second novel, The English Wife, English architect, Sophie Parry, finds herself stranded on the island of Newfoundland (part of the Canadian province of Newfoundland & Labrador), when her flight to New York on 9/11 is diverted to the small town of Gander, Newfoundland. She contacts her estranged aunt Ellie, who had moved to Newfoundland as a war bride in 1946, and who now lives in a remote outport fishing village on the northern Newfoundland coast. And what an experience it is for her!

I spent a month in the spring of 2019 travelling around Newfoundland, and one of the things a particularly enjoyed was the site of clusters of wooden houses appearing on the shore, in all the colours of a jellybean bag. There is even a street in the capital, St. John’s, known as Jellybean Row.

The delving into paint pots of rainbow colours began in the 1960s during the revitalisation of St. John’s. Prior to that, buildings were painted white, or dark, drab colours, with the fishing “stages” – one-room sheds on stilts on the shore used to prepare and store fish – painted dark red. Now you’ll find buildings all over the island – some over 200 years old – painted in these candy colours. And what a site they are, with the steely blue-grey of the North Atlantic in the background.

You don’t have to go far from the centre of St. John’s to find your first fishing village. Quidi Vidi (pronounced “Kiddy Viddi”), is located behind Signal Hill with its stone lookout, Cabot Tower, on a small harbour known as “The Gut”.

Some of my favourite places to find these hidden gems are in Trinity, on the Bonavista Peninsula; Salvage (pronounced Sal-VAGE), on the tip of the Eastport Peninsula; Newtown, a restored historic outport; and Joe Batt’s Arm and Tilting on the island of Fogo, where you’ll also find Brimstone Hill, according to the Flat Earth Society, one of the four corners of the world. Careful, don’t fall off!