Haliburton Sculpture Forest: Cottage Country Culture.Haliburton Sculpture Forest is attached to Haliburton
school of the arts at Sandford Fleming College and it's
in one of Ontario’s principal ‘cottage country’ destinations.
Whether you're at your cottage or a resort in
summer
or enjoying the resort in a haliburton winter, the
Sculpture Forest is a pleasant way of passing the time. I summer, it's a pleasant woodland stroll. In winter, it's a ski or snowmobile trail.
In winter, the Haliburton sculpture forest can still be visited by cross-country skis as the trail is part of the local cross-country (or Nordic) Ski Club trail system.
A snowmobile trail, Head Lake Trail, also runs alongside
many of the sculptures, ending near this sculpture of a Sleeping Huntress. Presumably Diana, the goddess of the hunt. How even a goddess can sleep with the noise snowmobiles make, I can't imagine.
I said on another page that people often thought of Canada as
being like Narnia - 'always winter and never Christmas'.
This next artwork plays on the Narnia theme and a link to Canada -- the beaver. For those of you not familiar with the Narnia Chronicles, Mr Beaver is the first Narnia creature to meet all the children near the lamp post. I don't know if the author, C. S. Lewis, ever visited Canada or
just associated snow with beavers but he can't have met too
many beavers in his home town of Oxford, UK.
Another mythical creature, and like Diana, not commonly associated with North American forests is the god, Pan. Nevertheless, here's Pan, playing his pipes, and taking a well-earned rest from 'pan'-icking nervous travellers. Perhaps Pan too emigrated.
This nice sculpture of a woodcutter and son in conversation near
a tree stump is intended to show how the young are changing older people's ways of looking at the world and encouraging conservation. It seems an unlikely theme to me. Most young people I meet just want to have fun, not save the natural world.
I haven't shown all the sculptures here, otherwise there'd be nothing left for you to discover when you visit:).
I leave you with one of the more colorful statues, standing at the school of art itself. This horse and rider is the beginning and end of the artpark, if you like.
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This sculpture integrates time and the compass to commemorate Sir Sandford Flemming's contribution to modern travel, see our
