Separated from the east coast of Canada by the turbulent seas of the Gulf of Saint Lawrence, and as close to Greenland as to New York, Newfoundland is one of North America’s most isolated and intriguing places. Last summer, Hazel Findlay travelled there in search of rumours of gigantic granite sea cliffs along the south coast. Whilst rain and fog quelled her climbing ambitions, she left the island with a set of different gifts.

Climbing takes you to places, but most of the time you take away more than just climbing. It’s often hard to put your finger on what it is you’ve taken away: you can remember the routes and the grades and the progression, but there’s always more. It could be friends, adventures, laughs - or even just the special feel a place has when you’re there, and in your memories once you’ve left it behind. On an adventure to Newfoundland, Canada - a place that has seen few footprints and fewer climbers - there was little of the climbing and much more of the latter.

I didn’t know a whole lot about Newfoundland before I went on this trip, but I did know a few things. Firstly, one of my local pubs is called the Nova Scotia. And unlike my local pub, the real Nova Scotia is not down the road, but across the Pond - just south of Newfoundland. What else? Three recent summers spent in Canada gave rise to the subject of Newfoundland perhaps a handful of times. On each occasion the peculiarity of the Newfie accent was discussed. In Britain you can usually seek an incomprehensible accent by travelling down the road, but in North America you generally have to travel the length of the country, so the indecipherable nature of the Newfie accent is a curious phenomenon for Canadians.

However, I also got the impression that it isn’t just the accent that stands the Newfies apart; it’s something more. Newfies in Canada, a little like the Irish in Britain, commonly end up being on the wrong end of a good joke. The main theme of these jokes is that the Newfie is dumb, drunk, poor, or slow - or any combination of these. Not knowing anything more about the inhabitants of the easternmost reaches of Canada, it was hard to gauge whether these jokes were based on their real characteristics or not. Although I was puzzled by the Canadian perception of Newfoundland as a backward banana republic, it wasn’t until I was given the opportunity to visit the island that I thought any more about it.