Broom Hill is a hill and eponymous rural neighbourhood in

Sooke Sooke is a district municipality on the southern tip of Vancouver Island, Canada, by road from Victoria, the capital of British Columbia. Sooke, the westernmost of Greater Victoria's Western Communities, is to the north and west of the Sooke ...

British Columbia British Columbia (commonly abbreviated as BC) is the westernmost province of Canada, situated between the Pacific Ocean and the Rocky Mountains. It has a diverse geography, with rugged landscapes that include rocky coastlines, sandy beaches, ...

. Its residential subdivisions surround Broom Hill proper, which is composed of

gabbro Gabbro () is a phaneritic (coarse-grained), mafic intrusive igneous rock formed from the slow cooling of magnesium-rich and iron-rich magma into a holocrystalline mass deep beneath the Earth's surface. Slow-cooling, coarse-grained gabbro is ch ...

which rises to an elevation of 283 metres (928 feet). Above the subdivisions, most of the terrain has a forest cover dominated by

Douglas-fir The Douglas fir (''Pseudotsuga menziesii'') is an evergreen conifer species in the pine family, Pinaceae. It is native to western North America and is also known as Douglas-fir, Douglas spruce, Oregon pine, and Columbian pine. There are three va ...

Trails

At the top of Broom Hill is a swing looking out over Sooke Harbour and the

Juan de Fuca Strait The Strait of Juan de Fuca (officially named Juan de Fuca Strait in Canada) is a body of water about long that is the Salish Sea's outlet to the Pacific Ocean. The international boundary between Canada and the United States runs down the centre ...

. There are three access points to the trail Blanchard Rd, Mountain Heights Dr and Denfield Rd
Map
Hikers and bikers regularly travel the trails, but they are not marked, and cell phone service is weak.

Where Broom Hill Got Its Name

In the 1850's Captain Walter Colquhoun Grant was scouting for new lumber markets in Hawaii when the wife of a Scottish consul gifted him with a packet of

Scotch Broom ''Cytisus scoparius'' ( syn. ''Sarothamnus scoparius''), the common broom or Scotch broom, is a deciduous leguminous shrub native to western and central Europe. In Britain and Ireland, the standard name is broom; this name is also used for other ...

seeds. Grant brought the seeds to his Sooke homestead and planted them in the fertile ground at the bottom of what is now known as Broom Hill. Now considered an invasive, Scotch Broom can be found growing all along the pacific coastline from Alaska to California.

References

Populated places in the Capital Regional District Hills of British Columbia {{VictoriaNeighbourhoods