When the building of the UNESCO-recognized world heritage site, the Rideau Canal was completed and opened in 1832, the thousands of stonemasons, Irish and French-Canadian were out of work. They looked elsewhere for employment while still remaining in their profession, hiring out to build town and country homes and buildings throughout the Ottawa Valley and beyond from the same stone excavated around Kingston, limestone from the Frontenac Axis, construed of rocks formed 1.35 to 1.06 billion years ago (Precambrian: middle to late Proterozoic age) and then deformed and metamorphosed 900 million years ago.

Those heritage homes and buildings stand as beautifully designed and constructed today as they did in the mid-19th Century, with features reminiscent of British classical architecture, some of them incorporating Palladian windows and in the interiors panelling, along with other then-popular details including central staircases leading to a partial upper story with slanted ceilings echoing low roofs and rooms radiating out from the staircase, without a central hall feature such as we know them today. In the more modest of the home's rooms tend to be relatively small, but numerous. The wide pine floorboards feel warm and smooth underfoot.

We had the privilege of being guided through one of those homes on Saturday. We marvelled at the beauty of the deep window sills, a feature of stone buildings. The limestone exterior was beautifully dressed, the rooms, one leading into another without benefit of a connecting hallway, led us into another architectural era entirely, one pleasing to the eye and sensibly envisaged. One entire side of the house is blessed with a covered porch, with a roofline of its very own, beside which was a later addition; a roomy two-car garage.

The first floor is comprised of a small, modernized kitchen, beyond which is a laundryroom and a powder room. From the kitchen there is direct access to a fairly large dining room and leading directly from it, the living room. In fact, entering from the front door the living room is on the right, the dining room on the left, and the kitchen beyond it. Off the living room is a study/office.

Upstairs, there is a large bathroom with all modern appliances suitable for up-to-date plumbing. At the head of the stairs there is a small, roomy area and radiating out from the staircase are three bedrooms, and a sitting room. The original panelling is beautiful, the interior is immaculate with fresh paint and period-appropriate wallpaper. And the rooms are furnished with pieces of furniture of the period that the house itself represents; some given to the couple owning the home by her parents, avid collectors of Canadiana a half-century earlier, and some since acquired.

In the back, beyond the house was a driveshed, where implements such as tractors are kept, necessities in managing an acreage of that size. The owners have been busy in the short time since they bought and moved into their heritage home, cutting walking trails through the nearby bush. Soon after moving in they had a white picket fence built around the front of the property, which sits adjacent a highway, and two minutes' drive from a small town. That the house sits on a large acreage comprised of fifty percent each bush and tillable land for a total of 70 acres, represents another vast bonus. The land, the watershed of the South Nation River is flat, resulting in a vast sky landscape.

Close by the house grow gigantic old honey-locusts, and nearby the house are also beautiful old flowering crab trees. Beyond, in the bush, which is likely of third-growth generation at the very least, poplars predominate, along with native buckthorn, cedars, wild grape vines, a proliferation of dogwood and maples; further off on other acreage of bush are where conifers have regenerated.

And oh yes, besides our daughter and her partner, our granddaughter lives there awaiting resumption of her university year in Toronto. There are also, on the exterior very large enclosures where eleven dogs, most of them now quite elderly, enjoy the out-of-doors when they're not being taken for walks on the acreage, using the newly-cut trails. Two cats live there as well.