Ernest Blair Experiment

It has been a busy week that started on Mother’s Day. Heather and I took the drive from Annapolis Royal on Highway #8 to Kejimkujik National Park. Still closed, presumably until the weekend of May 25. The trees are beautiful at this time of year: red maple, white birch and white pine.

We then crossed from Highway #8 to New Germany on Highway # 10 via #208 South Brookfield, Pleasant River and Hemford. It was lunch time. We noticed the Hummingbird Cafe. We stopped for lunch.

It was excellent food and the cafe was packed with families from the surrounding communities. Afterwards, we took Highway #10 home to Middleton.

The next day, we wanted more exercise. We started the day at the parking lot on the Hampton Mountain Road. We walked the road to the side entrance of Valley View Park. The beech hangers were coming into their Spring flora. We noted our first red trillium in flower. We completed the trail through the park then up to the fire tower.

After a good stretch, we decided to return home via West Dalhousie. At the junction of Hwy #201 and the Morse Road, at 3 pm, we were behind the school bus. It made numerous stops before reaching the T-junction in the community. Before the village centre, there was significant evidence of the burn from the Long Lake fire (see Trial by Fire), including around the cemetery.

From the community centre, it is a dirt road, past several church camps to reach Hwy #10 at New Albany. From there, down South Mountain via Nictaux Falls to Middleton.

Two books relevant to our travels.

From Sandra Barry is the link to her Dalhousie Review publication “Shipwrecks of the Soul: Elizabeth Bishop’s reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins”, 26 pp.

From the Middleton library, I received a notice to pick up the poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins. (see posts It’s a Small World and A Celebration at Meier Point).

References

Mary Primrose and Marion Munro, 2006, Wildflowers of Nova Scotia: New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island, Formac Publishing Company.

W.H.Gardner and N.H.Mackenzie (Ed.), 1967, The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, Fourth Edition, Oxford University Press (see the Series of Collected Works of Gerard Manley Hopkins).

Today, Heather and I wanted to get away from town. We chose to walk the Bohaker Wilderness Trail at Delaps Cove on the Bay of Fundy.

We walked out to Meier Point. There is a commemoration stone from the family. It contains the following quotation from Gerard Manley Hopkins.

“What would the world be once bereft of wet and wildness. O let them be left wet and wildness. Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.”

Afterwards, we stopped for lunch at the Crows Nest in Hillsburn.

They serve an excellent fish chowder.

Somehow, this discovery seems to bode well for the collaboration between Christian and myself (see Mapping the Geography of Places) Christian Gastmeier and Bob Maher.

Postscript

While no picture of the commemoration stone from the family could be located, a description of Gerard Manley Hopkins’ poetry was found, described in Frances Cafferata’s MA Thesis Dissertation from the University of British Columbia, “Gerard Manley Hopkins’ use of nature in his poetry“.

This weekend, I made contact with Christian Gastmeier. He is a student at COGS working under the supervision of David MacLean. He is working remotely from Sudbury, Ontario. It is a capstone project: developing an AI-driven NLP pipeline for Spatiotemporal extraction.

I have included two paragraphs from his proposal:

“ Background

Since 2013, Bob Maher has maintained an extensive digital record of geographic observations through his blog ‘The Ernest Blair Experiment’. This body of work contains over a decade of high-fidelity local knowledge regarding the Annapolis Valley. However this data is currently ‘unstructured’, existing as a narrative text rather than a spatial database. Transforming this narrative into a Geographic information System (GIS) requires Natural Language Processing (NLP) to bridge the gap between human story telling and provincial resource management.

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to develop a reproducible cloud-based AI pipeline using ArcGIS to extract geographic themes from unstructured text. Leveraging the full ArcGIS online (AGOL) suite this project will:

1. automate extraction
2. Geocode and Validate
3. Cloud- Native Visualization
4. Multi-media Integration
5. System Scalability

Where things stand today (Monday, May 4,2026) ?

1. Christian emailed his Capstone project proposal
2. We had telephone conversation
3. Bob agreed to provide hard copy ( 13 volumes of his ernestblairexperiment blog
4. Christian is working remotely from Sudbury, Ontario.
5. Deliverables:
6. Spatiotemporal Cloud Database
7. Automated Extraction Pipeline
8. The Ernest Blair Digital Atlas

This blog will be sent to a wide range of industry/academic partners.

If you are interested in the full project proposal, contact Christian at W0529818@nscc.ca Future blog posts will track our progress.

Edward is unavailable for a few days. He suggested that I post this blog, as is.

We arrived in Annapolis County in 1980. I had accepted a teaching position at the Nova Scotia Land Survey Institute (NSLSI). It was to teach applications of mapping software in an intensive one year program (48 weeks) in Scientific Computer Programming. Heather and I, with two young boys (Patrick and Andrew), moved from Ottawa (National Museum) to West Dalhousie. We rented what was known as the Ernest Buckler house from Bill O’Neill. He and I commuted down the Morse Road to Bridgetown, and on to NSLSI in Lawrencetown.

After a couple of years, we moved to Clarence East, neighbours to the Barteaux, Elliot and vanRoestel families. In 1988, we moved to Indonesia, California, Ontario (Peterborough) and BC (Victoria) before returning to accept the position of Senior Research Scientist with the Applied Geomatics Research Group (AGRG) at the NSCC in 2000. At that time we purchased a house in East Paradise on Highway #201. Now, in 2026, we have relocated to Middleton.

Throughout our time in Annapolis County, we explored the Bay of Fundy coast, the Annapolis Valley and, to a limited degree, North and South Mountain. Despite our familiarity with the local Geography, we had never been to East Dalhousie.

Given the forest fires last year (see Trial by Fire), I wanted to visit Lake George and Lake Paul. We started out, gassing up the car in Berwick. Moving up onto South Mountain, it is very evident why Berwick is considered the “Apple Capital” of the Valley. From Morristown, we passed through Lake George and Lake Paul reaching the Dalhousie Road, where we turned west to East Dalhousie at the Kings County/Annapolis County line. At East Dalhousie, we turned South on the Cherryfield Road. The Cherryfield community is on Highway #10. Afterwards, we headed North, back to Middleton.

Three significant observations were made on travelling the backroads of Annapolis County

1. Access to good maps is essential.
   We always have a copy of the Nova Scotia Atlas in the car. In this case, the seventh edition.
   
2. The forests of South Mountain are remote and relatively inaccessible.
   Given the nature of climate change, there is a high probability of forest fires by lightening strikes. This happened in 2025. The management of these forests is critical, not only for remote communities, but also the proximity to the communities along the mountain slopes — not a time to reduce the resources and capacity of NS Lands and Forests.
   
3. It is very evident from the signage on individual driveways that the public, individual land owners, are concerned about the mining of uranium.
   Without travelling these back roads, the average politician/ civil servant would not understand the public concern.

A final comment.

The drive through the back roads of Annapolis County was a revelation. And yet, we have known the geography since 1980 (approaching fifty years) on and off, and have been part of the history of the College of Geographic Sciences (COGS).

References

Explore Annapolis County, Your Guide to Discovery, 2026.
The Nova Scotia Atlas 2019, Formac Publishing, 7th edition

Postscript

Edward visited the Annapolis County booth during the recent Saltscapes Exposition in Halifax. At the booth he did get a poster map, “Explore Annapolis County: This is where you wander”. The County marketer told him that the map promoted exploration “Choose your own adventure. Start anywhere. Go everywhere”. In essence it was thematic in nature.

A portion of the poster map is shown, above. A couple of QR codes on the back invite explorers to “Continue your journey with more itineraries and ways to wander”.

After our recent visit to Tatamagouche, I wanted to return to Lunenburg to check out the bookstore ‘Lunenburg Bound’ (see also Heading to the South Shore and Lunenburg Bound). I wanted to try to answer the question. The Geography of Local Writing? Does it reflect the activities or landscape of a particular place?

In response to my blog, Sandra Barry had referenced Mary Rose Donnelly’s ‘Great Village’. I am also aware that Sandra is a resident too of Middleton, and has written extensively on the life and times of Elizabeth Bishop (see Eccentrics in Paradise and One, Two, Three).

First and foremost, Tatamagouche and Lunenburg are very different communities. One is a university town; the other is a historic, sailing and tourism community.

Yesterday morning, we took Highway #10 across to the South Shore. The road was empty. The landscape is forested with evidence of fires and tree harvesting. Through New Germany to Bridgewater; on Highway #102 to Blockhouse and Lunenburg, our destination was Lunenburg Bound, the bookstore and the bakery/coffee shop next door.

The bookstore is excellent, both new and used books are well catalogued.

What did we find?

The Orwell book was irresistible. Part of the ‘ernestblairexperiment’ blog takes Eric ‘Blair’ from George Orwell.

After coffee and treats next door at the bakery, we retraced our route back to Middleton.

References

Lorne Fitch, 2025, Conservation Confidential, Rocky Mountain Books.

George Orwell, 2025, Can Socialists be Happy?, Penguin Archive Classics.

Postscript

I shall continue my research on ‘The Geography of Local Writing’.

Thank you, Edward for your links from the blog archives.