I’ve slowly been working my way through all the sections of the Rockcut Trail in Twillingate. My Nan lives in Bayview, so it’s been a fun project to work on from summer to summer when I visit her. Summer of 2025 was particularly special because we had a family reunion over a weekend in July and many of my family members from all over the country came home to visit. 

Our time was mostly spent celebrating my Nan’s 90th birthday, but I also wanted to find time to go for a hike while I was there. Some other family members got wind of my plan and before I knew it, a group of 10 of us had wound up at the trailhead to French Head. This wasn’t my first time hiking French Head, I had done the trail with Seth and my parents way back in 2015, but I couldn’t remember it well enough to blog about it, so I was happy to revisit. 

The trail starts at the end of Main Street, where there’s a small parking lot for French Beach. You can hike into the beach along the trail or via a short road – both end up at the same place. 10 people is definitely too many for a group hike, so we quickly split into a couple of groups. We had some pace setters up at the front, the nature gawkers at the back, and a middle bridge group, which is where I mostly hung out trying to keep the everyone together (an impossible feat). 

French Beach is only a few minutes from the trailhead and is a gorgeous beach looking out on the harbour. From there, you hike up and around French Head. It’s an incredibly scenic trail and most of it is exposed, so you get views the whole way. I think this is one of the more popular sections of the Rockcut Trail (aside perhaps from the Top of Twillingate section), and it was surprisingly busy. From French Head, the trail continues up towards Spiller’s Point, which is a special place for us because it’s my Uncle Trevor’s favourite fishing ground, so we’ve spent a lot of time there in boat through the years. 

Once you hike around the point, the trail continues south towards Spiller’s Cove. At this point, our group really got separated. The slow paced nature group was really lagging and my GPS showed a shortcut through the bog, so that part of the group opted to take that exit and slowly make their way back towards the car. The shortcut is not marked and it is a muddy, wet section of trail with lots of brush scraping your ankles, so maybe not recommended if you’re visiting. Emily and Seth didn’t care about taking this route, but my mom was pretty cranky about getting wet feet. 

I didn’t take this route. Me and my cousin, Matt, opted to fastpack along the rest of the trail to try and catch the front group. The trail continues to be very scenic and we could just see the rest of our group hiking along the rock in the distance, but we had no hope of catching up with them. Eventually we made it down towards the end of the trail before it cuts out to go to Slade Lane, but it’s a little bit confusing in this section, with multiple trails branching off from one another. We thought we were following the rest of the group, but we ended up on an unmarked trail. The trail clearly existed, it was very developed, but it wasn’t marked on my GPS. 

We determined we had not taken the same trail as the rest of the family, but we thought we could find a shortcut back to the road. We ended up doing a bit of light bushwacking and ended up exiting the trail through a family’s backyard (whoops!), but we did end up back on the road just as the fast group was on their way back to the car. At the same moment, the slow group arrived on the road in the car and we had a good laugh about how we took 3 separate routes and managed to all end the trail at the same time!

I wouldn’t recommend our strategy though. If you’re visiting, I recommend just planning to do the full 6km route marked on the Rockcut Trail website. This route follows the trail of our fastpacking group and ends at Slade Lane, where you can follow the road back to your car. Alternatively, you can park a second car on Dump Road where there is a second parking lot. Either way, enjoy this beautiful trail, definitely one of my favourites on the island!