Green Gables Country

 Yesterday we paid a visit to the extensive heritage/retail complex that has grown up around the scenes that inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables. It's easy to see why she loved the countryside hereabouts, but you can't help wondering what she would make of what has been done in celebration of her legacy. The huge visitor centre on the site of her cousins' farmstead tells the story of her life, but in a strangely patchy way, with much omitted and too little useful information: in particular, many photographs, mostly of men who presumably had a role in her life story, are left uncaptioned and unexplained. The farmhouse – which inspired Green Gables, but where Lucy never lived – has been quite convincingly restored as a typical house of the period, complete with green gables (and the booklet about the upper floor is full of good biographical information, supported by quotations from Montgomery's writings). The whole place was heaving with visitors, predictably enough, but the woodland walk the author knew as Lover's Lane was fairly peaceful – and a single blue butterfly (a Summer Azure?) was flying there. It was a hot day, and after this visit we headed for the local beach and had a refreshing swim, undeterred by a few jellyfish stings (nothing serious – a mild irritation, gone in ten minutes). 
   Later, I read the account of Montgomery's life on Wikipedia, and discovered just how much was missing from the story told on site. It's a sad, sad story, which you can read here if you wish. And I was struck by this sentence:  
'In 1920, the house where Montgomery grew up in Cavendish was torn down by her uncle, who complained that too many tourists were coming on to the property to see the house that inspired the house in which Anne was depicted as growing up.' (If this was the birthplace house, it must have been rebuilt, as it still stands at some little distance from the rest of the site. Or was it the homestead where Montgomery lived for many years with her grandparents? Or even the farmhouse itself? As I said, too little solid information.)