The City
For a city of over 300,000 people, Hamilton is not over-endowed with attractions. The finest building in the centre is Whitehern (mid-June to Aug Tues-Sun 11am-4pm; Sept to mid-June Tues-Sun 1-4pm; $3.50), a couple of minutes' walk east of the city hall at 41 Jackson St W. A good example of early Victorian architecture, its reworked interior holds an eccentric mix of styles ranging from a splendid mid-nineteenth-century circular stairway to a dingy wood-panelled 1930s basement, the garbled legacy of the McQuestern family who lived here from 1852 until the 1960s. Also in the centre, at 123 King St W, is the Art Gallery of Hamilton (Tues & Wed and Fri-Sun 11am-5pm, Thurs 11am-9pm; $4), a brutally modern building whose two floors display a representative sample of Canadian painting drawn from the permanent collection. The gallery has a good selection of works by the Group of Seven - Harris, Lismer, J.E.H. MacDonald and Edwin Holgate all make distinctive contributions - and there's a fine painting by Tom Thomson, The Birch Grove , dated to 1917. Look out also for Alex Colville's iconic Horse and Train of 1954 and for several folksy paintings by Cornelius Krieghoff . The gallery also features an imaginative programme of temporary exhibitions with photography a particular favourite. About twenty-minutes' walk west of the town centre, straight down York Boulevard from James Street, you come to the much more entertaining Dundurn Castle (late May to Aug daily 10am-4.30pm; Sept to late May Tues-Sun noon-4pm; $7), a handsome villa built in the 1830s for Sir Allan Napier MacNab, a soldier, lawyer and land speculator who became one of the leading conservative politicians of the day. He was knighted for his loyalty to the Crown during the Upper Canada Rebellion of 1837, when he employed bands of armed Indians to round up supposed rebels and loot their property. Carefully renovated, Dundurn is an impressive broadly Palladian building with an interior that easily divides into "upstairs" and "downstairs": the former filled with fine contemporaneous furnishings, the latter a warren of poorly ventilated rooms for the dozens of servants. Nearby, the gatekeeper's cottage has been turned into a small military museum (July-Aug daily 11am-5pm; Sept-June Tues-Sun 1-5pm; free admission with castle), detailing local involvement in the War of 1812 and in the Fenian (Irish-American) cross-border raids of the 1860s . From Dundurn Castle, York Boulevard crosses the four-kilometre-long isthmus that spans the western reaches of Hamilton harbour before heading on into the neighbouring city of Burlington. The Royal Botanical Gardens (tel 905/527-1158, www.rbg.ca ) cover some 3000 acres around the northern end of the isthmus, their several sections spread over 15km of wooded shoreline. The flower displays here are simply gorgeous with highlights including the Hendrie Park Rose Garden (best June-Oct) and the neighbouring Laking Garden with its irises and peonies (May & June). These two gardens adjoin the main RBG visitor centre, where there's a shop, cafe and several inside areas featuring forced bulbs, orchids, cacti and so forth. Wilder parts of the RBG are round to the west with the 800-hectare Cootes Paradise Marsh nature sanctuary latticed with hiking trails. The outdoor garden areas are open daily from 9.30am to dusk and admission costs $7. There are modest additional charges for some of the inside areas, which also close a little earlier - either 4pm or 5pm. As for transport, most Hamilton-Burlington buses stop outside the RBG centre and from here a shuttle bus (late April to Aug every 15min; free) visits every section of the gardens. At other times of the year, you'll need a car.
Your Tip for Hamilton
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