Woman revisits Lucy Maud Montgomery's honeymoon in Scotland
Gail Harding | CBC News | Posted: July 4, 2017 10:28 AM | Last Updated: July 4, 2017
Photographs will be presented as part of Wednesday series at Bideford Parsonage Museum
A woman from Scotland will be sharing her story of retracing Lucy Maud Montgomery's honeymoon at an event in Bideford, P.E.I., this week.
Dianna Hemphill said she became interested in Montgomery after researching her own genealogy and discovering she had common ancestors with the author.
"I first visited P.E.I. in the 1990s and I loved it so much that my husband and I went back again a couple of times," she said.
Before returning for another visit in 2013, Hemphill decided to visit all the places in Scotland that Montgomery wrote about in her journal.
"I got to the section of the honeymoon and I just tracked all the places she had been, and I followed up and did a modern version," said Hemphill.
Hemphill retraced Montgomery's trip starting in Glasgow, a place the author didn't like, and used the city as her base to go visit other locations.
She also took photographs of what the places look like today.
"She came to Trossachs, which is where I live, and she went to Loch Katrine because she was very interested in Sir Walter Scott and The Lady of the Lake, and she'd always wanted to go to Loch Katrine, which is 20 minutes away from here," Hemphill said.
Montgomery's former residence
Hemphill will present those photographs and describe how the locations have changed since 1911 Wednesday night in Bideford, P.E.I.
The event is part of a series at the Bideford Parsonage Museum and it falls on what would have been Montgomery and Rev. Ewan MacDonald's wedding anniversary.
The museum is in the former home of where Montgomery boarded for a year when she taught school there in 1894.