In Cape Breton, a Rugged Golf Getaway Piotr Redlinski for The New York Times Scenes From Nova Scotia Golfing at Cabot Links, poutine and local wildlife. "Well, you can tell we're not in Myrtle Beach," said my brother Tom, peering into the darkness from the passenger seat of our rental car. Rain was pelting down and we were trying to navigate the Cabot Trail, the scenic but occasionally harrowing two-lane road that encircles much of Cape Breton, the island at the northern tip of Nova Scotia. For more than an hour, we hadn't seen another car, let alone one conveying the basic unit of Myrtle Beach social life: four sunburned guys wearing Titleist caps. A time zone to the east, we were on the same kind of mission that sends so many tourists to South Carolina. We were on our way to the little town of Ingonish, on the island's northeast corner, to play golf, of all things. It wasn't part of the plan, but we also wound up eating a lot of poutine, a concoction of French fries, brown gravy and cheese curds that for some reason has become a signature dish in this part of the world. Rugged and beautiful, this island has always attracted visitors, but it is hardly known as a golf haven, even though Ingonish is home to one of Canada's best courses, Highlands Links, built in 1939. Last summer, Cabot Links opened in the old coal-mining town of Inverness, in the southwest, and people are already calling it one of the better layouts not just in Canada, but in all of North America. A second 18-hole course is scheduled to open there in 2015. The season is shorter than it is in Myrtle; the courses are farther apart; there is no night life; and some of the food makes you wonder about life expectancy in the Maritime Provinces. On the other hand, there is no traffic to speak of (unless you find yourself backed up behind a tour bus on the Cabot Trail) and getting a tee time is no trouble at all. For the adventurous golfer, Cape Breton could become a prized destination. Golf is hardly part of the island's heritage. Cape Breton was not settled by country-club types. The people who moved there were miners, loggers and fishermen, many of them exiles from Scotland, driven out by the Highland Clearances of the early 19th century. For generations they spoke Gaelic, a language still used on road signs. Ingonish is a long way to go for golf, but if you add in Cabot Links, the trip is worth it. The place to stay is the Keltic Lodge, a big Tudor-style resort on a bluff overlooking the Atlantic that has been popular among well-to-do Canadians since the "40s. We didn't book in time, and wound up down the road at the Glenghorm Beach Resort, which felt like a time capsule from the "50s. The furniture was spartan and well dinged, the ceiling of our room was acoustic tile, and the air-conditioning, had we needed it, consisted of a plug-in electric fan. A lot of Cape Breton is like this: a throwback to an earlier, hardier kind of tourism. In the little towns that dot the circumference of the island (the interior is virtually uninhabitable), there are no chain motels or chain restaurants. The main accommodation is the tourist cabin. Little clusters of them - like the ones Lolita and Humbert Humbert stayed in - are set back from the road as you come around a bend, some with hand-lettered signs out front, and the restaurants tend to be no-nonsense mom-and-pop places. The restaurant at Glenghorm was closed when we got there, so we ate instead at the resort's Thirsty Hiker pub, where the menu, as my brother pointed out, was clearly not created by Alice Waters. There were no vegetables to be had, as far as I could make out, but two of the featured dishes were deep-friend pepperoni and something called Mexican poutine, which proved to be regular poutine embellished with salsa and jalapeño peppers. It's not an accident, I concluded, that in Canadian French the word poutine means "mess," among other things, and though I had had poutine only once before, at a ski lodge in Quebec years ago, I decided now that when it comes to this particular dish, I am a classicist. If you ask me, French fries, gravy and cheese curds benefit from jalapeños about as much as foie gras would. Nor is Mexican poutine a recipe for untroubled sleep. My digestive system was still smoldering when we headed next morning to Highlands Links, which, strictly speaking, is not a links at all. That is, it's not built on dunelike land bordering the sea. A couple of early holes overlook the Atlantic, but most of it goes up into the forested highlands, and its most distinguishing feature is drastic elevation changes. CHARLES McGRATH, a contributing writer for The Times, is editor of the "Golf Stories" anthology (Random House, 2011).