Amet Island, Pictou County

Amet Island is a small islet lying just outside the mouth of Amet Sound on the Northumberland Strait, the namesake feature for the wide, shallow embayment that shelters several local harbours and anchorages in Pictou County. This small island appears on some of the earliest French maps of the region and was mentioned in Nicolas Denys’s (1958-1688) description of the coast of Acadia published in 1672.

The name come from the old French word l’armet meaning helmet and referring to the shape of the island. On the 1755 d’Anville map the name contained the letter r, but dropped on latter maps after that.

Historically it was marked by a 19th-century lighthouse erected as part of regional navigational improvements in 1866.

This Island, on which the lighthouse was built the present year, is very small, containing not over one and a half acres. It is composed of clay, and is decreasing every year, from the action of the frost. The sides of the island being nearly perpendicular, a foot or two of the bank falls off in the spring, and is washed away by the tide, which rises to the base of the bluff. I would therefore recommend that a wall or breastwork be built round the Island, to preserve it from further falling away; otherwise in a few years more there will be nothing left but a dangerous reef of rocks.

In 1868, a stone wall was built around Amet Island. The project took six months and resulted in the island being ringed with stone wall that extended six feet above the high-water mark. A powerful hurricane on August 24, 1873, churned up the waters around Amet Island, and the resulting waves swept from one to three courses of stone away.

Today, an unmanned light remains on the island to help navigation into the sound.

[Sources: Lighthousefriends.com / Place Names of Atlantic Canada – W. Hamilton]