The Eastern Townships, Canada: A Trip Built on Small Inns

The Eastern Townships, Canada

A Trip Built on Small Inns

Most people who know the Eastern Townships know them as the part of Quebec you drive through on the way somewhere else. It deserves a trip of its own.

The region sits southeast of Montreal, just above Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine. You’ll find back roads, small villages, lakes and low mountains, a good inn at the end of each short drive, and people who are happy you came.

English and French sit side by side here. Loyalists fleeing the American Revolution settled much of the region, and you will hear both languages at most stops. A few French phrases help, though nobody will hold it against you if that is all you have. If you pay in U.S. dollars, your money goes a long way right now, at about 1.40 Canadian dollars to one.

North Hatley

North Hatley wraps around the top of Lake Massawippi. In the 1880s, families from the American South began arriving for the summer, some in private rail cars, to escape the heat. They built big houses on the lakeshore, and the village still feels like a summer colony.

The best-known of those houses is Manoir Hovey. Henry Atkinson, who founded the company that became Georgia Power, built it in 1900 as his summer home, inspired by Mount Vernon. It is now a 36-room inn, owned by the same Quebec family for decades. It is grand, yet it still feels like a house. A very, very nice house. Atkinson's books are still in the library. Have a drink and a casual meal by the fire in the Tap Room, and save Le Hatley, the main dining room, for a long dinner.

Down the road, Auberge La Raveaudière is a seven-room inn in an old house across from the golf course. Breakfast is served in a single room, at one long table and two smaller ones. The rest of the day, guests drift between the two sitting rooms with books and coffee.

The Abbey

Under an hour's drive away, on the shore of Lake Memphremagog, about 30 Benedictine monks live at the Abbey of Saint-Benoît-du-Lac. Monks exiled from Normandy founded it in 1912. Visitors can sit in on the 11 a.m. Mass, which the monks sing in Gregorian chant, and it is worth planning the day around.

Afterward, go downstairs to the shop. The monks have been making cheese since 1943, and they make cider from their own orchard.

Knowlton and Sutton

Knowlton, on Brome Lake, is home to noted author Louise Penny. Penny spent 18 years as a CBC radio journalist before publishing her first novel, Still Life, in 2005. Her series about Chief Inspector Armand Gamache now includes about 20 novels. Several have reached No. 1 on the New York Times bestseller list; she has won the Agatha Award five times, and the books have been translated into more than 20 languages.

Most of the books are set in fictional Three Pines. Penny has called it a state of mind, and she built it from the real towns around here. Manoir Hovey became the lodge in A Rule Against Murder, and the abbey inspired the monastery in The Beautiful Mystery. Her fans come on pilgrimages. Brome Lake Books keeps a corner for her novels, along with a bench and a mural of three pine trees. Each October the town holds the Knowlton Literary Festival, and this year Penny was its featured author.

Sutton, about half an hour south, is a mountain town. In the fall, Mont Sutton runs its chairlift for leaf-peepers. You can ride up, walk the trails near the summit, and hike back down through the color. In winter, it is a ski hill. Either way, the town below has a good run of restaurants, bars, and shops, and locals who will tell you how much they love living there.

Montreal at Either End

Most visitors fly into Montreal, and the drive to the Townships takes between one and two hours, depending on where you are headed. Save time for Old Montreal at the start or the end. Its old streets are lined with shops, galleries, and one good restaurant after another, and a few hours isn't enough.

Three or four nights in the Townships, split between two inns, is about right. A week lets you slow down. Readers with more time often add Quebec City, about three hours to the northeast, though that is a trip of its own.