Happy Valley Forest
One of the largest intact hardwood forests left on the Moraine, with the Oak Ridges Trail through it. Quiet enough to hear the woodpeckers.
King Township
Horse country. King City, Nobleton and Schomberg sit inside the Oak Ridges Moraine, surrounded by some of the most tightly protected green space in southern Ontario, and twenty minutes from a subway station.
Stock photograph. Not King Township.
Farms and forest
Feels like
55 min by GO from King City
To Union Station
Land, with the Moraine out the back
Go for
How to say it
King Township, and then the village: King City, Nobleton, Schomberg, Ansnorveldt. Saying just “King” gets you a pause while somebody works out which one you mean.
Heads up
Greenbelt protection means very little new housing and very few shops. You will drive to Newmarket, Aurora or Vaughan for groceries, and a lot of homes run on a well and a septic system.
Who to go and watch
The clubs, and which ones you can actually get in to see.
OJHL junior hockey
King Rebellion
Junior A hockey in a township of four thousand-odd people, which makes for the most small-town rink experience in the GTA.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about King Township.
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.
Cold Creek Conservation Area
Trails, boardwalk and birding on a former rifle range. Free, rarely busy, and open all year.
Schomberg village
Main Street Schomberg is two blocks long and has a café, a bakery and a butcher on it. That is the entire point of Schomberg.
Nobleton
The township's eating village: strongly Italian, with a couple of bakeries that people drive up from Vaughan for on a Sunday.
King City's Keele Street
Small, tidy, and the only stretch in the township that feels like a high street. There is a GO station at the end of it, which is rarer here than it sounds.
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”.
Late spring
Schomberg Fair
An agricultural fair running since the 1850s, over four days after Victoria Day. Horses, a midway, and a village of a thousand doubling in size.
March
Maple syrup season
The sugar bushes across the township tap in early March and several open to the public. It is the first thing that happens after winter and everyone goes.
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.