For author Steve Skafte, This River Was Once a Road represents a decade of incessant adventures—ten years of trawling through old maps and property records, searching for the secrets that Nova Scotia's abandoned roads—all still public rights-of-way, open for all to use—have been keeping from "ordinary folks" like him.

In that time, he's explored countless overgrown fields where he's discovered rock walls, old wells, foundations, and signs of former human habitation. For Skafte, each of these roads inhabits a time and place lost; a track through the wilderness to a place that someone once called home.

Featuring 80 evocative colour images, with GPS coordinates to guide readers to each unique location, and more than 20 deeply poetic tales of discovery, This River Was Once a Road traces the paths of our past to reveal the places we've left behind.