Travel: Quebec

Well, herring for lunch was never remotely a possibility. The rest of it is true. After three hours and a fistful of minutes, here I am - on the periphery of the country of the Hebridean immigrant, in the province of Quebec. My mission begun.

Staring through the windscreen at the clapboard houses that make up Stornoway's community, I think of the homesick French and lost Italians who rested their wagons in this hinterland, naming new townships after old lives: Nantes, Milan. I picture too the huddles of Gaelic-speaking Scots, blown west by the storm-winds of hardship and hunger, building cabins here close to the border with Vermont. The past - their heritage - still formidably alive.

Of all the immigrant nationalities who came here, it was the Irish from north-east Ulster and the Scots from the Western Isles who proved most tenacious. Here they found hardship. They planted their roots in a rugged soil. In the well-tended graveyard just over the highway from Stornoway's tall, imposing Presbyterian church, I squint at headstones marking the family graves of MacLeods, McDonalds, Morrisons and MacArthurs. The small inscription on a memorial cairn reads simply: "In the early 19th century, thousands of Gaelic-speaking peoples, guided by the unseen hand of God, came to this place. Their works shall follow them."

Their descendants purchased sheep, breaking their backs over six days of labour, singing their psalms on the seventh day, keeping it holy. Shake the map and out fall place names such as East Angus, Gould and Scotstown. Other Scots had by now arrived. Across a century and a half, the refugee immigrants from the Highlands adopted French as their principal tongue in what became known as the Cantons de L'Est, these scattered townships of eastern Quebec.

The soft countryside of undulating fields has a gentle beauty. You have to imagine it as they found it, smothered in woodland, barking with noises of alien life. Swatches of forest still stand darkly against the softly-rising ripple of blue-green hills. Crag and tail mountains ride the horizon beneath a fleet of full-sailed clouds. Between Stornoway and its southern neighbour, Gould, three ancestral cemeteries mark yet more Presbyterian graves. A remnant of Gaelic speakers survived until 60 years ago, shyly uttering a tongue that, in its death throes, became an embarrassment, the last of its adherents taking the language to the grave in the 20th century's last decade.

Unlike the Hebridean capillary roads, the arrow-straight, smooth highway from Stornoway to Gould allows a view across vast expanses. A tiny patch of market gardening, two dairy cows, an old outhouse and a straggle of sheep in the shade of a stout two-storey farmhouse fashioned from planks is all that I pass until an abattoir looms on the outskirts of Ste Marguerite which borders Gould.

The population of the district is barely 400 today, and decreasing. As in many rural retreats across the world, it is the elders who remain, those whose roots are too embedded, and those so enchanted with the rhythms of a bygone way of life that they have retired here, who are the keepers of the heritage. The young, of course, once schooled here, leave for a faster way of life and the promise of jobs.

Gould is my stop-over - my digs for the night are at the charmingly topsy-turvy McAuley House, owned by Scotophile Daniel Audet, who runs Auberge La Ruee vers Gould. Chief cook and bottle washer, his sleeves rolled up, he turns from the stove to greet me, wearing a Royal Stuart tartan kilt and matching waistcoat. "Bonjour Tom," he says, cracking a Liberace smile, gesturing broadly towards the dining room where the tablecloths are boldly printed in tartan.

As we walk to the nearby house he cradles his "archive": books and ring files, a daunting hoard of lovingly cosseted memorabilia. "I am sure you will want to look." Later, staring at the assembled paraphernalia spread on my bed, I am tempted to think of it as homework, to be completed before the promised Scottish Inspiration Dinner provided by Daniel at 6pm. I fear he may wish to ask me questions. Where are the answers?

Rising up from faded pages are black and white ghosts from the "before life" - pictures of the fisher folk of Cromarty mending creels on Ross-shire's shores, and the people of Stornoway, and of Orkney, bent to their labours in rocky fields in the place they called home. Then, I am staring at a picture of a ceilidh, held outdoors, on a long narrow bridge; the bridge has a roof, almost identical to the bridges of Connecticut. On it, blurred, are the new Scots-Quebecers, dancing a reel in full kilted glory, a fiddler and a piper conjuring tunes. The bridge must be thrumming, the crowd full of hooch. The new life recorded is filed here together with the old.

The McVetty-McKenzie covered-bridge is now a tourist attraction, two miles and five minutes' drive away to the north. The river it crosses is studded with wildflowers and hammocky hollows, a spot for picnics, a lure for photo-opportunists. I stand on the bank beneath the bridge where the river gargles over boulders, looking back at a forest of pine and a tiny cabin selling the work of local artists.

With two hours to kill before Daniel's feast, I drive the dirt track from Gould to Scotstown across the thunder of a salmon river, just south of the hamlet of Hampden. Farther east is Lake Megantic, an anagram of "magnetic", which it is. I do not resist.

Above the highest lakeshore birches a bird of prey is wheeling slowly. Without warning, folding its wings, it hits the water like a spike and rises clutching something glistening and frantic. In these parts hunting seems like breathing - it always has been. Archaeologists have dug up the bones of caribou hunters roughly 12,000 years old. Today, local hunters stalk herds of deer, wild boar and wild turkey, sometimes bear.

"Turkeys are worst," says Marcel, the Gould community's mayor, a hunter himself. He and his wife, are my companions at the Inspiration Dinner. We start with Daniel's signature cockaleekie soup, then plumpish oysters, grilled, wrapped in strips of crispy boar-bacon and melted cheese. Agneau au Scotch- lamb flambeed in whisky and served with wild mushrooms and sauteed onions - is the main. Sufficient alcohol prompts Marcel to describe the hunt.

"We honour tradition, hunting first with bows and arrows from late September. In late October, into November, we start using rifles. By then the bears have begun hibernation. Nature, red in tooth and talon, is essential to the food chain."

I wake in the dark around 4am in the McAuley house, hearing branches crack in the woods. I picture a bear picking up my scent through the open window. Holding my breath, I tumble fitfully back to sleep and wake at dawn to catch the putrid waft of skunk from the nearby bushes. Daniel's tabby cat stares up at me from the veranda, licking its paws.

Later that morning I drive due west to the town of Magog on the northern tip of Lake Memphremagog whose waters cross into Vermont. Today is the centrepiece of Labor Day celebrations. The Fete des Vendanges - a harvest festival of local food and wine - is in lip-smacking swing by the water's edge. But it's not why I'm here. I ask the first family I meet the question that really matters: have they encountered the Monstre du Lac?

Her name is Memphre. She is to Lake Memphremagog what Nessie is to Loch Ness. She has her fans; she has her sceptics. "The Loch Ness monster at least exists," says the man of the family, a guy more intent on scoffing his burger. "And she's bigger," adds his partner. Should I enlighten them? I decide to check Memphre's credentials for myself.

Escapades Memphremagog runs cruises, circumnavigating the lake all the way to the border with Vermont. So, here I am, properly vigilant, sipping cava, nibbling a taster of local cheeses, while scanning the water for Memphre action. The view is pretty, studded with million-dollar homes hogging the foreshore. Above them the hinterland is burgeoning with trees on the brink of their annual blaze of colour: golds and crimsons, serried oranges and umbers, soon to be casting reflected glory on to the ripples of the lake in the unfolding of the Fall, like that of New England to the south, an autumnal glory.

There's no sign of Memphre. The so-called sightings that I've read about talk of a serpent, and there are experts who attribute the sightings to sturgeon breaking the waves. As soon as we dock, I head for the festival tents for something more substantial than the rumours of a myth. The food and wine are a riot of flavours. The marquees are crowded. Outside, an oompah-band plays tunes beneath an awning.

That night, my last in the Eastern Townships, reinforces the Scottish connection. I stay in a B&B in the picture-perfect village of North Hatley on Lake Massawippi. The village pub provides the class of warmth and friendliness I associate with home. The B&B is named A la Cornemuse (meaning bagpipes); my bedroom boasts a painting of Edinburgh Castle, and the landscape surrounding the house is so like Perthshire that, in a flash, I am struck by the thought that this part of Canada - be-kilted, monstered and bagpiped - is the twin of the Highlands. A dram of something suitably aged - slainte to that! - would make the parallel complete.

TRAVEL NOTES

Getting there

Canadian Affair (canadianaffair.com, 0141 223 7517) has return flights with Air Transat from London Gatwick to Montreal from £485. Easyjet (easyjet.com) flies daily to Gatwick from Glasgow (return from £75) and Edinburgh (return from £68). Budget care hire is conveniently located at Montreal Central railway station and has cars from £20 daily (budget.com).

Where to stay

Auberge La Ruee vers Gould (rueegouldrush.net) has rooms in the auberge and the McAuley House from $100 per night.

What to do

Explore Lake Memphremagog with Excursions L'Air du Lac at Magog (croisieremagog.com/en/cruises.asp). Eat at the Pilsen Pub, North Hatley (pilsen.ca).

Further information

For free brochures, advice and information call Tourism Quebec (0800 051 7055, 3pm-10pm, seven days) or visit bonjourquebec.com.