Music of Nova Scotia

Forrester's musical ensemble consists of award winning highland bagpipers, drummers, bodhran players and fiddlers. They all work together to provide their audiences with a varied repertoire of Celtic music with a mix of both traditional and contemporary works of music and dance.

Forrester's Cape Breton Scottish Dance Company

Forrester's Cape Breton Scottish Dance Company is the performing group of the Forrester School of Celtic Dance established in 1965 under the direction of artistic director Eileen (Pottie) Forrester of Sydney, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia.

The dance company has been invited to represent Canada and their province during many international festivals. They have performed all over the world including Canada, the United States, Europe and Asia. One of the highlights was their participation in the World Folklore & Folk Game Festival in Taiwan in 1997 with 300,000 spectators and twenty other countries represented.

Another festival that ranks among their favourites was Rhythms of the World at Epcot Centre, Walt Disney World, Florida in which they represented Canada and performed in twenty-one shows at the America Gardens Theatre by the Shore.

The Island

Cape Breton Island lies off the north east coast of Nova Scotia, Canada. It is separated from the mainland by the Strait of Canso. The island is 175 kilometres (110 miles) long and 140 kilometres (87 miles) wide, with over 1,000 kilometres (650 miles) of Atlantic coastline. In the centre of the island lie the Bras d'Or Lakes, a salt water lake system that stretches right across the Island.

In 1497 the first Europeans, led by the explorer John Cabot arrived on Cape Breton and claimed the land for the King of England.

Around the 1750's Cape Breton began to receive its first major influx of Scottish settlers. In the aftermath of the Battle of Culloden, chieftains were replaced by landlords, and tenant farmers were evicted from their ancestral homes en masse in order to convert their lands to sheep runs which would turn a profit for the landlords. This resulted in the so-called "Highland Clearances", a mass exodus to the New World. Between the years 1775 and 1860 upwards of 25,000 immigrants came to Cape Breton from the Highlands and Islands of Scotland. Today in Cape Breton the language, music and culture of the Highland ancestors are still maintained.