The Woodleigh Replicas come back to life

 

 We drove to see the Woodleigh replicas again this year because of events that had transpired over the previous 12 months. After we returned home last year, I joined a Facebook group attempting to somehow save them from likely demolition. Here is the link:

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10151202633876675&set=a.10150825433611675.466263.593756674&type=1&comment_id=8561504#!/groups/17808904425/

The group grew over the year and now has over 200 members, but until recently no one had stepped up as leader. Posts were becoming more and more despondent when, lo and behold, we learned part of the property had been bought by Tim Archer, a country and western singer and producer from Ontario, who planned to restore the property to its former delight.

I was going to say glory, but that is not quite the right word: more about that in a moment. Suffice it to say Tim has his work cut out for him. You can listen to an interview here with Tim here on CBC:

http://www.cbc.ca/mainstreetpei/episodes/2012/07/17/woodleigh-replicas---tim-archer/

He has already restored the Blue Dragon Inn, booked solid as a bed and breakfast, by word of mouth, all summer. He was about to walk the current guests’ dog, as we arrived to say hello, but he paused to chat.

 

 

The fountain and wishing wells are working again, and Tim has put back together the cherubic statues tossed into the fountain at some point by local vandals. A team of volunteers has done other restoration work.

Tim is planning a haunted house for Hallowe’en. (I felt the maze planted with pine trees, and now very thickly grown together, was already rather haunted.) At Christmas, he told us he hopes to have a typical English celebration in the farm house and grounds.
 

Just as we were leaving, a well-dressed middle-aged man walked up the lane. He was vacationing from Nova Scotia (his family was waiting in the car), and he said he wanted to revisit the replicas he’d been to many years before. He reminisced that the model of Yorkminster Cathedral was built from stones from Nova Scotia and that it took many years to build in such meticulous detail.

I visited the replicas for the first time in the 1980s. The first time I remember trying to paddle a boat on the pond with my daughter; we couldn’t get it to do anything but go in circles. I think we also had ice cream. I remember her fascination with the Tower of London replica and how she was small enough to follow all the corridors.

 

But I am not sure that the Woodleigh Replicas are really meant for children. You may ask why.

It occurred to me that so many of the people who delighted in the Woodleigh Replicas are now middle-aged. And that our current fondness for the replicas was redolent of nostalgia, which my dictionary describes a longing for home or for an idealized past. In fact, the word is made up of the word for return (nostos) and the word for pain (algia). Nostalgia is something that perhaps very few young children feel, as they are as yet so new to this world. Their hurts and pains are likely more concrete, specific and present.

Nostalgia — the sometimes painful yearning for what is past ― is for older folk. In fact, a subsequent entry in my 1953 edition of Webster’s is “nostology,” which it defines as the study of aging — a term I find so much more poetic than its more modern synonym, geriatrics.

So why do the Woodleigh Replicas tug at our heartstrings? I suppose not only do we have memories of visiting them in happy times with our children, but they themselves are a product of nostalgia. Their builder was Ernest Johnstone, a veteran of World War I who wanted to recapture the delight he felt while touring English monuments and buildings before returning to PEI after that war. He and his son Archibald, a world war II veteran, began to build the first of the replicas in the late 40s after the latter returned to PEI from the battlefields.

 

Their choices (including the previously mentioned cathedral, Anne Hathaway's cottage, Shakespeare's birthplace, Nelson’s monument, the Old Curiosity Shop, Dunvegan castle, and the Tower of London) are sometimes whimsical and certainly idiosyncratic.

Their placement on the grounds follows no particular pattern or plan. And now that the trees have grown up, and the lawn is unmowed, they take on a layer of greater mystery.

They must have meant a lot to both of these battle-weary men — maybe as a symbol of what they had been fighting for in both their wars. Who knows, but I think of it in that way. In any event, they weren’t built originally to be a commercial money-making venture.

 

The replicas are endearing because they were constructed for the sheer love of it. They are evidence of play – play taken very seriously, a characteristic of imaginative play at its best after all, for many of the replicas took years to build. After years of neglect, the mortar is still in pretty good shape, although the thatch on Anne Hathaway’s cottage needs work, and I wouldn’t count on the wood in the floors.

 

The grounds were opened to the public in 1957 and operated for close to 50 years. There were several owners after the Johnstones, the last of whom simply handed the keys to the government in 2008 when he could no longer look after the property and no one wanted to buy it.

My Google search revealed that some of the actual miniatures were put up for sale — a goofy notion if there ever was one. No one seems to have appreciated the true value of these odd structures, as a tribute to imagination and the joy of creation however quirky it might seem to the less imaginative among us.
 

As a commenter said in the  Summerside Journal Pioneer in 2011 (three years after the auction of the property failed to find a buyer), “it is more than a business. It is a work of art, and it should be preserved.”

I second that sentiment, and I wish Tim Archer every success with his endeavours.