TRAVEL NEAR
All aboard for SHAWNIGAN L AKE tales By IAIN LAWRENCE
for more than 20 years, the renowned artist E.J. Hughes lived at Shawnigan Lake. He liked to sit in his wooden boat and sketch the shoreline as he drifted. Most often he looked north, up to the knobby peak of Baldy Mountain, down to the old hotel. A little farther along was the house where he lived, with his parents’ house beside it. In his paintings, the water is always bright and blue, sparkling with light. You can see how he loved the place. Shawnigan Lake is still a well-loved cottage spot, a mere 45 minutes from Victoria. A getaway for Victorians for more than a century, it is still a great place to rent a cottage, stay in a B&B, kayak, swim, waterski, have a meal or go back in time at an excellent little museum. To get there take the Malahat to the Shawnigan Lake Road turn-off, follow the road that was once the old wagon route. And go back a hundred years. Hughes paintings are on display at Shawnigan Lake Museum, along with pieces of his life: a side table of bamboo; a work table from his last studio; a jar of brushes and a palette still caked with his oil paints. A sketch of his wife is marked with notes for a future painting: “cool for green.” Curator Lori Treloar is rightly proud of the display. “For a small museum, it’s actually a stunning collection,” she says. Hughes’ parents’ place is now a vacation rental owned by Kim Pemberton, who preserved the hardwood floors and wainscoted walls. Her guests
E.J. Hughes, Old Baldy Mountain, Shawnigan Lake; 1961, oil on canvas. (ejhughes.ca)
enjoy the broad verandah, looking over the private dock in Strathcona Bay, where canoeists and ducks paddle through the reeds. “I like to think that Hughes’ parents used to sit here and watch him motor out onto the lake to paint,” says Pemberton. Behind the house are the tracks of the old Esquimalt and Nanaimo Railway and a cairn that marks the place where Canada’s first prime minister, Sir John A. MacDonald, hammered in the last spike of this Island railway in 1886. On the lakeshore below, the narrow Goldstream Trail went by on its way
from Victoria to Nanaimo. Today the road passes in front of Pemberton’s house, busy with traffic, though still narrow. It was the railway that opened Shawnigan Lake. Even before it was completed, the first hotel was built at the north end. Within four years, a sawmill and a burgeoning village were built. Among the first settlers were 24 British colonels retired from service in China and India. They acquired vast properties and built mansions. One chose a sloping prospect on the lake’s north end, calling his house Knockdrin, after the castle in Ireland. The croquet lawn and wooden
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