This scenic area is found behind the village of St. Bernard. Like many of Clare’s villages, New Edinburgh has more than one name.
Loyalists had originally surveyed this stretch of land to be the shire town of Digby County, having selected the territory at the right of the mouth of the river. Given that the surveyors were Scottish, they named their newly acquired land after the capital of Scotland. But their plans did not materialize and most of these colonists left for other parts of the County.
The French Acadian settlers who were already there or came later, mainly descendants of Amiraults and Doucets, preferred the name “le-Bas-de-la-Rivière” or “below the river”. Today both names are used interchangeably, but it is more common to find “le-Bas-de-la-Rivière” among the Acadian residents.
