A town so tight knit and far from mainstream society is full of hidden intrigues and eccentrics, and the longer one stays the more engaging are its complexities. Bamfield, with its extraordinary history, seems the perfect subject for a novel, though whether by Stephen King or Carl Hiaasen or Patricia Cornwell depends on how long you stay, and whom you meet.  

But it is also the perfect place just to read a novel — by the fire, in the quiet, with no more than the sibilant sea in the background, and the high Pacific winds sweeping gently over the trees. Its abiding peace is just a part of its charm. Once it was known by all the schoolchildren of Britain; now it is an all-but-forgotten little sea-girt village, no more than an insignificant dot at the southern end of a tiny notch in a Canadian Pacific cliff — and all the more delightful and memorable for being so.