MABOU, Cape Breton Island -- Summer has come to Cape Breton Island, the Brigadoon of Nova Scotia that stretches for 110 miles into the Atlantic Ocean. Until 1955, when the Canso Causeway opened, connecting Cape Breton with the mainland, the island really was remote and all but inaccessible, cocooned in mist.

	Terese Loeb Kreuzer photos The Keltic Lodge resort hotel in Cape Breton National Park has a great location on Middle Head, which cuts Ingonish Bay in two. Click photo for larger image. If you go Cape Breton: How to get there, what to do, where to stay

In mid-May visitors begin to arrive, and islanders who once scraped together a living in fisheries, farms, forestry and coal mines, fling open their doors to receive them.

With 650 miles of coastline, a salt-water lake system that nearly bisects the island, forests and steep headlands, Cape Breton is a place of remarkable beauty. But visitors come as much for the culture as the landscape.

Native tribes had lived on Cape Breton for thousands of years when the first European settlers disembarked in the early 17th century. Most came from France and Scotland. The "Highland Clearances" of the 1760s when landowners evicted Scottish tenant farmers from their ancestral land lured thousands more Scots to the New World. Many settled on Cape Breton.

Today, the island has the only living Celtic culture in North America, with a Gaelic College in St. Ann's, a Highland Village Museum in Iona, and somewhere in the stretch between Port Hastings and Margaree Harbour (the so-called "Ceilidh Trail"), a "ceilidh" -- an informal jam session -- of music, dancing and storytelling -- every night of the summer.

"Music in Scotland was a huge thing," says Alexander MacDonald, who was born in the town of Mabou on Cape Breton and has returned there to retire. "My ancestors came from Lochaber in Scotland. They left with a great love of music. Folk researchers will tell you that when people left the mother country and came to isolated places, which islands are, they tend to retain more of what they left."

Kinnon Beaton plays at the Celtic Music Interpretive Centre in Judique, which offers workshops during the summer and has an exhibit room and archives that are open year-round. Click photo for larger image.

Mr. MacDonald, who with his wife, Suzanne, owns the Mabou Village Gallery on Main Street, picks up his fiddle to play a few tunes. "In Cape Breton when I was growing up, nobody taught anybody anything," he remarks. "You just listened."

Cape Breton is particularly known for its fiddle playing and step dancing, traditions that have all but disappeared in Scotland. On Cape Breton, they have been passed down from generation to generation with certain families such as the Barra MacNeills, the MacIsaacs, the MacMasters, the Beatons, the Rankins -- and others -- noted for their distinctive styles and their musicianship. But almost everyone of a certain age plays, at least at the hobby level.

"The fiddle is such a versatile instrument," MacDonald explains, "and there are so many different ways of bowing that you can play exactly the same tune with exactly the same notes giving the same value to every note and you can make it sound very different by embellishments that you use with your left hand on the strings but more particularly on how you use the bow."

One of the best places to learn about Cape Breton fiddling and dancing is the Celtic Music Interpretive Centre in Judique, which offers workshops, lectures and performances throughout the summer.

"In the late '60s and early '70s, the music was dying out around here," says Kinnon Beaton, the director. "When I was 12 in 1968 and started learning to play, there were almost no young people learning to play the fiddle. It was an old-person's music. Then, in 1972, a video was released called 'The Vanishing Cape Breton Fiddler.' It was a wake-up call. People here took it as a challenge. The old people started teaching the young people. The parishes would buy fiddles for the kids and pay for their lessons. So there's been a revival since then. Now there are Cape Breton fiddlers who are known all over the world -- and the young people look up to them."

Last fall, the Celtic Music Interpretive Centre opened an exhibit section that includes audio clips, paintings, artifacts and "an eight-minute fiddle lesson" from Mr. Beaton. Visitors are invited to pick up a fiddle and try a few notes. They can also learn a few dance steps from another video.

	A farm on Collingdale Road in West Mabou, Cape Breton Island. Click photo for larger image. Nova Scotia Cape Breton Island: www.cbisland.com. Visitor information centers are located in Port Hastings (near the Canso Causeway), 1-902-625-4201; Baddeck, 1-902-295-1911; and Inverness, 1-902-258-3740.

A painting in the exhibit depicts a kitchen party, which was the traditional venue for Cape Breton fiddling. People would gather in someone's home and the party would go on all night. "It was a release from their troubles and their hard day's work," says Beaton. "My mother is 88 now, and when I would ask her about going to a house party, her face would just light up as though she went to heaven."

Kitchen parties are still held on Cape Breton, but for visitors who haven't been invited to one, an evening at the Red Shoe Pub in Mabou would be the next best thing. The congenial pub, owned by the Rankin family, books first-rate performers every night of the summer. And from Mondays to Saturdays during the summer, there's a square dance somewhere in Inverness County. The best known one is in West Mabou on Saturday nights from 10 p.m. to 1 a.m. and is for all ages.

By October, the tourist season on Cape Breton is drawing to a close, but not without a final, dazzling flourish. With the fens adorned in gold and russet and the highland forests ablaze with autumn hues, a festival called "Celtic Colours" arrives with nine days of performances, workshops, lectures and storytelling. Last year there were 40 concerts with around 450 performers. The events take place in communities all over the island.

"The festival has become a focal point for the traditional culture here," says Joella Foulds, artistic director along with Max MacDonald, with whom she founded the festival in 1997. "Performers and audience come from all over the world."

Many of the artists stay at the Gaelic College in St. Ann's or in the Baddeck area. A "Festival Club" at the college provides a nightly opportunity for performers to continue to jam. "It starts at 11 p.m. and goes on until 3 or 4 in the morning," says Ms. Foulds. "It's probably the heart and soul of the festival. There's an opportunity for collaborations and exchanges and developing friendships. You never know who's going to be on the stage. People line up to get in and it's full every night."

And so another season comes to a close on Cape Breton. Winter wraps its arms around the island until the ice thaws in spring and the tourists return.