Queen Street, Port Perry
Two blocks of Victorian shopfronts running downhill to the lake, with independents, a bakery and a bookshop on the way. It is genuinely lovely.
Scugog & Port Perry
A Victorian main street that runs straight down into a lake. Port Perry is the prettiest thing in Durham, and Scugog is the farmland, the island and the water around it.
Stock photograph. Not Scugog & Port Perry.
A lakeside Victorian town
Feels like
80 min, by car
To Union Station
A main street, a marina and a slower week
Go for
How to say it
SKOO-gog. The town is Port Perry; Scugog is the township and the lake. Say Port Perry and everybody knows exactly where you mean.
Heads up
No train, no highway, and the wind off Lake Scugog in January is a serious thing. This is a car town and a snow-tyre town, and you will want both.
Who to go and watch
No club of its own.
Nothing professional. Scugog's sport is on the water: sailing and bass fishing through the summer, and ice huts and snowmobiles once the lake goes hard.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Scugog & Port Perry.
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.
Palmer Park & the boardwalk
The park at the bottom of Queen Street with a boardwalk along the lake and a gazebo that half the region's wedding photographs feature.
Town Hall 1873
Built in 1873 as a township office, jail and courthouse, and now a working theatre. About the most charming small venue in the region.
Scugog Island
Across the causeway: farmland, the Mississaugas of Scugog Island First Nation, and the Great Blue Heron. Flat roads, good for cycling.
Lake Scugog
Patios along the waterfront in summer, and the marina restaurants that stay open into the autumn. Book on a Friday.
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”.
July
Canada Day over the lake
Fireworks from the waterfront, watched from Palmer Park, the boardwalk and about two hundred boats.
Late summer
Port Perry Fair
A long-running agricultural fair with livestock, a midway and a horse show, on the edge of town.
November–December
Christmas in the village
The Santa Claus parade and a month of late-night shopping on Queen Street, which is exactly as picturesque as it sounds.
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.