Kangaroo Road twists and climbs so much that the name seems to explain itself. It doesn’t. According to the Metchosin Museum Society, the road is named for a joke made in a government office.
In the 1890s a settler could stake 160 acres of Crown land and earn title by living on it. Plenty of them wandered off before their time was up, and a claim left empty for six months could be taken by someone else. A Lands Department official, watching the paperwork pile up, is said to have asked what was the matter with the people out there, always jumping one another’s claims “like a lot of kangaroos.” The road built in 1896 ran through what locals were already calling the Kangaroo District.
Most West Shore names hide a story like that. Below are 37 of them, checked against the province’s own place-name record, with the sources linked. Where the record contradicts itself, or nobody knows, we say so.
According to the Metchosin Museum Society, it comes from a Lands Department official’s joke about settlers who kept “jumping” one another’s land claims like kangaroos. The road, built in 1896 to link Metchosin with Sooke Road, ran through what locals called the Kangaroo District.
The twisting, up-and-down road does move like a kangaroo. The museum’s account says that is a coincidence.
Black settlers who had left the United States farmed here from about 1860. Some accounts say their singing gave the valley its name. Happy Valley’s postmaster in 1905, I.G. Walker, reported that one of them, Isaac Mull, named it, possibly for his joy at becoming a free man under the British flag.
Mull, by the same account, lived to be more than 100.
Nobody has recorded why. The province does record the order: Humpback Reservoir was named in 1950 “in association with Humpback Road, a long-established local name.”
It is an Indigenous name, recorded by James Douglas in 1842. Its meaning is usually given as something like “place smelling of fish oil.” Local tradition ties it to a whale rotting on a beach.
The sources offer several possible meanings. All of them involve fish oil.
It is named for John Frederick Witty, who bought Bilston Farm beside the lagoon in the 1860s.
Officially it was Metchosin Lagoon from 1934. The name everyone used only became official on May 25, 1973.
It runs through the old Bilston Farm, which Capt. James Cooper named after his home town of Bilston, near Wolverhampton in England.
Until 1992 the official maps had Bilston Creek running into Metchosin Creek. Metchosin council told the province it was the other way round, and the maps were changed.
It is named for Thomas Blinkhorn, a justice of the peace who came out on the barque Tory in 1851 with his wife, Anne, as an independent settler rather than a Hudson’s Bay Company servant. He ran the farm at Metchosin.
The Blinkhorns never lived on the mountain.
Capt. Henry Kellett of HMS Herald named it in 1846 for Prince Albert. It faces the city named for his wife, Queen Victoria, across Royal Roads.
Kellett’s survey that summer named much of this coast. You will see him again below.
Kellett named it in 1846 after Lt. William Pedder, whom he knew in Hong Kong when the island was ceded to Britain. Pedder was Hong Kong’s harbourmaster in 1844.
Hong Kong’s Pedder Street is named for the same man.
Both honour one man: the Arctic explorer Sir William Edward Parry, a friend of Kellett, who named them in 1846.
William Head was a quarantine station for arriving ships from 1894 to 1958. It has been a prison since 1959.
Kellett again, in 1846. His note: “This dangerous group is appropriately named, for the tide makes a perfect race around it.”
They are named for a pioneer family. Hugh J. Weir received the Crown grant for Section 34, Metchosin District, on Dec. 7, 1871.
Admiralty charts called the point Turn Point. It was renamed, presumably to avoid a duplicate.
According to the Metchosin Museum Society, it is named for Thomas Taylor, Minister of Public Works in Premier Richard McBride’s government.
Kellett named it in 1846 for a Royal Navy surveying officer, Becher. Early charts misspelled it “Beecher,” probably mixing it up with nearby Beechey Head, named for a different officer.
The misspelling stuck to the road and to the Nation’s English name, Beecher Bay First Nation. The Nation’s own name, Sc’ianew, means “the place of the big fish.”
It is named for Capt. Edward Edwards Langford, once of the 73rd Regiment, who arrived in May 1851 to run the Hudson’s Bay Company’s farm at Esquimalt. Langford Lake carries his name on the company’s 1855 map.
The Akriggs’ “British Columbia Place Names” says Langford, his wife and “five good-looking daughters” were the first English family to emigrate to the colony. He went home to England in 1861.
It is named for Florence Isabella Langford, the captain’s fifth daughter. It is on the 1855 map too.
It began as Gold Stream, for gold found in the river’s gravel. The province’s record says more than 300 men were working the river by 1864.
The same record credits Peter Leech with the find in 1858. Another entry in that record has Leech with the Royal Engineers on the Mainland until 1862, and his famous strike came on the Leech River in 1864. Treat the 1858 story with care.
In 1848 the Hudson’s Bay Company built the first sawmill in British Columbia on this stream, about 500 metres above today’s Parsons Bridge. It was shipping lumber to the United States by 1849.
The company’s 1855 map called it Rowe Stream.
The mountain is officially Skirt Mountain, a name adopted in 1911. The province’s record says the resort and subdivision on it are called Bear Mountain because the golf course was designed by Jack Nicklaus, the “Golden Bear.”
Why it was ever called Skirt is not recorded. It was Skirt Hill on the 1855 map.
Nobody knows. A note on the province’s name card in 1934 reads: “Very old name; origin unknown.”
It is named for Roderick Finlayson of the Hudson’s Bay Company, who took charge of Fort Victoria in 1844.
An 1862 Admiralty chart called the summit Leading Peak.
The neighbourhood took the lake’s name when its post office opened in the general store in 1947. Why the lake is called Glen is not recorded.
Highlands District was already a colonial land district by 1860. The municipality took the name in 1993. Nobody wrote down why the district was called that.
Capt. Langford’s family called the company farm Colwood, after their family property in Sussex, England. The post office opened in 1881.
One family named two cities: Langford after the man, Colwood after his house.
Kellett named it Royal Bay in 1846. “Roads” is the sailor’s word for a roadstead: open water where ships anchor while they wait to enter a harbour, here Victoria or Esquimalt.
It takes its name from Esquimalt, which Douglas wrote down in 1842 as Is-whoy-malth. The meaning recorded is “a place gradually shoaling,” for the tidal flats.
The 1855 map calls the lagoon Salt Lagoon.
Rodd Hill is named for John Rashleigh Rodd, first lieutenant of HMS Fisgard, which was on the Pacific station from 1844 to 1847. Fisgard Island and its lighthouse carry the ship’s name.
Guns were first mounted on the hill in 1864 to guard Esquimalt Harbour. The lighthouse was lit on Dec. 1, 1860.
Nobody knows for sure. The estate was already called Hatley Park before James Dunsmuir bought it and built the castle in 1908. Accounts credit one earlier owner or another, and none is documented.
It was a lookout over Royal Bay, now Royal Roads. The Town of View Royal says a real estate developer coined the name around 1910 to sell the “royal views.”
Both were stagecoach stops where coaches dropped the mail. The Town of View Royal says their addresses were six and four miles from Victoria.
“Oldest pub in B.C.” is a marketing line. We could not find a record that settles it.
Kenneth McKenzie set up a company farm here in 1853 and named it after Craigflower, the home of Hudson’s Bay Company governor Andrew Colvile.
Craigflower Creek was Deadman River on the 1855 map and Deadman Creek until 1932. The Attorney General wanted “to perpetuate the name Craigflower rather than the gruesome one of Deadman.” Why it was called Deadman was never recorded.
It is named for the Royal Navy frigate HMS Thetis, on the Pacific station from 1851 to 1853.
Officially it has been two lakes, Upper and Lower, since 2003.
It comes from the T’Sou-ke Nation. T’Sou-ke is the stickleback, the small fish of the Sooke River estuary. Kellett named the inlet after the people in 1846.
Early settlers wrote it Soke or Soake and said “soak.”
Not otters. It is named for Cmdr. Henry Charles Otter, a Royal Navy surveying officer who, according to the province, was never on the B.C. coast.
He made his name surveying the Baltic in the Crimean War and helped land the transatlantic telegraph cable.
It is named for John George Whiffin, a clerk on Kellett’s HMS Herald in 1846, who later became a Royal Navy paymaster.
Born in 1826, he was about 20.
It is named for Dr. John Ash, who in 1863 bought more than 1,000 acres around what is now Matheson Lake. He meant to use the lake for a dock scheme on Pedder Inlet, and gave it up after spending a considerable sum.
His old classmate Dr. John Helmcken remembered him as good company “when in good humour but if in a bad one, Keep Clear.”
The province has two meanings on file. A 1959 note gives “place of bait.” A 1973 note, from a Tsartlip speaker, gives “a bunch of caterpillars.”
The Malahat post office opened in 1937 as Scenic View.
We could not find a source for any of these. If your family named one, or you have the deed, the council minute or the old map that explains it, write to hello@news.thewestshore.ca. We add it with credit.
How we checked: origins come from BC Geographical Names, the province’s place-name record, which quotes its own name cards, Walbran’s 1909 British Columbia Coast Names and the Akriggs’ British Columbia Place Names, with municipal and First Nations sources where they speak for themselves. “One source” means a single local history says it. Checked November 2, 2026. Something wrong? Write hello@news.thewestshore.ca. We fix it and say so.