A ski mountain, a main street lined with old wooden and brick buildings, art galleries and a couple of good coffee shops: Sutton is the kind of small Townships town that feels lived in rather than staged. It sits in the shadow of Mont Sutton, part of the Sutton Mountains, a northern extension of Vermont's Green Mountains and therefore of the Appalachians, and the US border lies just over ten kilometres south. About four thousand people live in the town and its surrounding countryside.
The area was settled by Loyalists, Americans who stayed faithful to the British Crown after the Revolution and moved north in the late eighteenth century. The English names, the covered bridges and the white churches all trace back to them. The Missisquoi River flows through the valleys nearby, and the hills are dotted with maple groves, where sugar shacks produce syrup in March and April, when the sap runs after freezing nights and warm days.
The riding here is excellent. The roads climb and drop through forested hills, with tight corners and steep gradients that feel more like Vermont than the flat Saint Lawrence plain an hour away. The ride over the mountain toward Glen Sutton and the Missisquoi valley is narrow and twisty, with gravel on some sections, and the roads west toward Dunham and Frelighsburg pass through vineyards and orchards. Brome-Missisquoi has a signposted wine route, and the slopes here produce cool-climate wines and ice cider, made from apples frozen on the tree or after picking.
Sutton has fuel, food and a few places to stay, though options are fewer than in the bigger towns. Lac-Brome, about fifteen kilometres east, has more services, and Cowansville, a little further, has the most. Watch for cyclists on weekends, since the roads around Sutton are popular with them, and for deer at dawn and dusk. In winter, of course, the town is a ski destination, and the snow comes early and stays late. The best months for riding are June to October, with autumn colours peaking around early October, when the maples on Mont Sutton turn flaming red and the whole valley glows.