The year LeTerrain became a Dark Sky Preserve

This year LeTerrain was certified a Dark Sky Preserve, the first in the National Capital Region, designated by the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. The certification is the result of years of steady work to protect not only the land but the darkness over it.

Alongside it we began a partnership with Lightbahn, whose work is astronomy, astrophotography and public engagement with the night sky. Together we are building a schedule of guided stargazing evenings, celestial events and photographic workshops, from meteor showers and planetary alignments to deep-sky observing under genuinely dark skies.

The part of that collaboration I am most curious about is astrophotography at the ancient stone sites. Photographing these structures under the stars, in long exposures that hold both sky and stone in one frame, is already turning up something quietly extraordinary.

A short video connecting the stone constructs to the stars travelled a long way past our usual circle this autumn, and that felt like a turning point. The relationship between earth and sky, between the stones and what people once believed about the night, is going to be central to what we share from here.

LeTerrain is now in a rare position: the region’s first dark sky preserve, holding one of the country’s oldest and least explained archaeological landscapes. Not as spectacle, but as an invitation to slow down, look up, and reconsider what came before us.

On the ground, the community grew. We hosted our most ambitious retreat in September, eighteen people for a week of wellness-focused days, and our first winter retreat, seven people putting their screens down for a few days in the cold.

The off-grid village gained a villager, and with them the beginnings of a music studio: a place to record and write with the wilderness in the room. Sustainability, spirit, resilience, community, science, history, art and conservation, all meeting on one piece of ground.

Thank you for being part of this. Every visitor, member, supporter, volunteer and villager helps keep it protected by sharing it.