Gaelic College at 75 - Highland Culture Thrives in Cape Breton - Repository of Ancient Celtic Traditions

The Nova Scotia Herald News has an article on the the 75th Anniversary celebrations of the Gaelic College of Celtic Arts and Crafts; "Seventy five years of ceilidhs, milling frolics, fiddle playing and bagpiping certainly sounds like something to celebrate...the only college in North America devoted to the preservation of the language, culture, traditions and musical legacy of the Highland Scots..".

The College web site gives us the following: "The Gaelic College was founded in 1938 as a school devoted to the study and preservation of the Gaelic language and Celtic arts and culture.  Situated in the heart of one of the earliest settlements in Cape Breton, the college began as a school of Gaelic language."

James MacKillop,  in his 2005 work "Myths and legends of the Celts", gives us an insight in to the richness and special nature of Scots Gaelic culture in Cape Breton: "The furthest flung and least studied canton of the Gaelic world lies in the Canadian Maritime province of Nova Scotia.  Large numbers of impoverished, landless Gaelic speaking Highlanders were settled there from the late eighteenth century through the middle of the nineteenth. They came from the former shires of Inverness, Argyll and Ross, both the mainland and the Hebridean Islands. Some were victims of the Clearances.  Whereas Irish, Welsh and Scottish Gaelic were once spoken, written and published elsewhere in North America, only in Nova Scotia did a widespread oral tradition flourish, one that has persisted until the twenty-first century. Adventures of Celtic heroes such as CuChulainn, Fionn mac Cumhaill, Oscar and Diarmait, are extended in a land of herring fisheries and maple trees. Some of the traditions that migrated to Nova Scotia , however, are not recorded in Scotland.  Their existence supports the documentable pattern that archaic survivals are found at the periphery of a given cultural area. Most of the Highlanders in Nova Scotia emigrated before folklore and folktales were thought worth recording (In Scotland)."

http://gaeliccollege.edu

http://thechronicleherald.ca/novascotia/1138696-gaelic-college-to-celebrate-75-years-starting-sunday

http://www.jamesmackillop.com