When the Highland Village Museum adopted and moved Malagawatch Church across the Bras d’Or lake in 2003, children’s author-illustrator Caroline Stellings asked herself: “What about the church mice?”

The answer is an imaginative tale of The Malagawatch Mice who, after living under the church for generations, learn that they are about to lose the floorboards from over their heads.

Ms. Stellings’ soft watercolour illustrations and delightful rhyming narrative follow the Malagawatch Mice–and the church–to their new home in Iona.

The Malagawatch Mice are well settled in their believed church, now at the Nova Scotia Highland Village in Iona, Cape Breton. But they are not alone–Henry, a stray cat with a mysterious past has taken up residence in the church and the mice are convinced that life will never be the same.

Yet, there is something familiar about this cat and, determined that there must be some good in him, Grandpa sets out to prove to Henry that he is much more than a no-good stray.

A monument in Halfway Cove, on Nova Scotia’s Eastern Shore, acknowledges that Prince Henry Sinclair of the Orkney Islands made the first transatlantic crossing and landed there in 1398, almost a century before Columbus. The monument describes his landing in Chebabucto Bay, and the fact that he spent a year exploring Nova Scotia, with the help of the kind Mi’Kmaq people.