Durham Forest & Walker Woods
The heart of the 220 kilometres: singletrack, bridle paths and groomed ski trails through the Moraine. Free, and busy with a very friendly crowd.
Uxbridge
The Trail Capital of Canada (the federal designation is real) with over 220 kilometres of trail through the Oak Ridges Moraine, a Victorian main street, and a mausoleum on a hill that people call Ontario's Taj Mahal.
Stock photograph. Not Uxbridge.
Hills, trails and a small town
Feels like
75 min, by car
To Union Station
Riding, running and skiing out the door
Go for
How to say it
UX-bridge. The Thomas Foster Memorial is just “the Foster”, and calling it the Taj Mahal marks you out as somebody who read a tourism page this morning.
Heads up
No GO train and no highway. Uxbridge is a lovely place to live and a hard place to commute from: most people who move here have already worked out how to stop commuting.
Who to go and watch
No club of its own.
The sport here is the trail network. Durham Forest and Walker Woods carry mountain bikers, riders and cross-country skiers all year, and there is a race or a group ride most weekends.
Where to actually go
5 things worth knowing about Uxbridge.
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.
Thomas Foster Memorial
A Byzantine-domed mausoleum built in the 1930s by a former Toronto mayor, standing alone in a field north of town. Concerts are held inside it, and the acoustics are extraordinary.
Uxbridge Music Hall
An 1880s hall on the main street, still the town's venue: comedy, concerts and community theatre most weeks.
Brock Street
The main street: independents, a bakery, a bookshop and a brewery within three blocks, and all of them busy with cyclists on a Saturday.
The Saturday market
Seasonal, on the main street, and small enough that you will be recognised by your third visit.
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”.
September
Uxbridge Fall Fair
An agricultural fair going back to the 1860s. Livestock, a midway, and the whole township on one field.
September
Celebration of the Arts
A long-running weekend of studio visits, exhibitions and performance across the township. Free and self-guided.
November
Uxbridge Studio Tour
Forty-odd artists open their own studios across the countryside for a weekend. One of the oldest studio tours in Ontario.
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.