This trippy 310-acre sculpture garden is less than three hours away and totally free

Imagine if Stonehenge had been built by one man with a cement mixer, a wheelbarrow and a stubborn refusal to stop. That’s Screaming Heads: an open-air opus by septuagenarian Peter Camani, who has spent the past four decades turning his 310-acre Almaguin Highlands property into a surrealist playground of towers, dragons, shrieking trees and screaming monoliths. It’s about three hours north of Toronto and totally free: Camani keeps the gate open so anyone can wander through his ever-evolving artwork.

Camani didn’t set out to build one of Ontario’s strangest landmarks. A retired high school teacher, he bought this Burk’s Falls acreage in 1981 for $70,000 and moved into its crumbling 1912 farmhouse. For seven years, he lived in a single room while repairing the place, treating the whole thing as an art project rather than a home renovation. By the early ’90s, the farmhouse had morphed into Midlothian Castle, complete with towers, a turret and a smoke-breathing dragon chimney.

As the house took shape, Camani shifted his focus outside: planting trees, plotting paths, digging ponds and shaping concrete into colossi. His summers off became dawn-to-dusk construction marathons, and his retirement in 2008 simply gave him more time to build. Today there are more than 100 sculptures on the property, some towering six metres high and weighing up to 27 tonnes.

From the ground, Camani’s sculptures play tricks on you: a ghoulish face turns into a tree, then suddenly you’re staring at the heart of the forest. From above, the property acts as a giant land drawing, a bit like the Nazca Lines in Peru: a large section was laid out as a dragon, complete with a ring of head statues to form its eye. These days, the 22,000 trees Camani planted on what was once bare farmland have started to blur the outline, but that’s by design—the dragon is meant to be slowly swallowed by the woods.

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For Camani, the sculptures are a kind of warning—a reminder that humanity won’t be around forever and that what we leave behind could look more like ruins than monuments. That’s why he’s fine with the forest and vines creeping over the place. The artwork is meant to be taken back by the land. And in a way it already hints at that ending: a few of the sculptures here hold human ashes, turning Screaming Heads into a cemetery as much as an art park.

At 77, Camani is still out there with a wheelbarrow and mixer in hand, pouring fresh concrete. His latest creation is a wall-and-tower complex with hands clawing out of one of the ponds. It’s an expensive obsession, and while there’s a donation box by the gate, the real bankroll comes each September, when the property hosts Harvest Festival—Ontario’s four-day answer to Burning Man that’s been running for over 25 years. Thousands of ravers camp among the screaming sculptures, dancing from dusk till dawn. It’s also the only time you’ll see the heads at night; otherwise, visits are strictly a daylight affair.

Open year-round from dawn to dusk, the grounds are free to explore, but Midlothian Castle is Camani’s home and is off-limits unless he invites you in. On the rare occasion when the gate is closed, you can view many of the sculptures from the road.

Screaming Heads, 981 Midlothian Rd., Burk’s Falls