Historic downtown Bowmanville
One of the best-preserved Victorian main streets in Ontario, and a working one: independents, bakeries and a bookshop, not a museum.
Clarington
Four towns and a racetrack. Bowmanville, Courtice, Newcastle and Orono spread east from Oshawa into orchard country, with a Victorian main street at the middle of it and the GO train finally reaching in.
Stock photograph. Not Clarington.
Small towns, big fields
Feels like
70 min
To Union Station
A historic main street and an acre
Go for
How to say it
CLARE-ing-ton, and almost nobody uses it. Say Bowmanville, Newcastle, Courtice or Orono; Clarington is the municipality's name, not a place anyone is from.
Heads up
It is the eastern edge of the GTA and the services thin out quickly. Check the school catchment and the nearest walk-in clinic before you commit: both may well be in a different town.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
Motorsport
Canadian Tire Motorsport Park
Mosport to anyone who has been going since it opened in 1961: a 900-acre road course through the hills, with a world sportscar race every summer and open track days the rest of the year.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Clarington.
Public places, parks, markets and the streets the independents are actually on. Nothing here is invented, and nothing here is a photograph of somewhere else.
Visual Arts Centre of Clarington
A public gallery in an 1840s stone mill beside a creek. Free, small, and the setting does half the work.
Bowmanville Valley & the Waterfront Trail
A creek valley running from the main street down to the lake, joined onto the Waterfront Trail. Salmon run it in autumn.
Newcastle village
A tidy main street and a harbour, ten minutes east. Where Clarington goes for a proper meal that is not in a plaza.
Orchard country
The concessions north of the 401 are apples, pumpkins and cider from August onwards, with pick-your-own at half a dozen farms.
The year
What comes round every year.
Keyed to a month, never to a date. Dates move, and a page that prints last year's is worse than one that says “September”.
May
Maplefest
Bowmanville's main street closes for the day. A street festival that has been running long enough to be an institution.
September
Orono Fair
An agricultural fair since 1852, in a village of about eleven hundred people. Livestock, a midway and the full country-fair experience.
October
Applefest
Bowmanville's biggest day: the whole downtown closed, hundreds of stalls, and a very great deal of apple.
HelloGTA.com
The GTA is enormous and most of it is unknown to everybody.
Including the people who have lived here twenty-five years. That is the whole brief: twenty-nine guides, and a question a week put to the region.