Today the water was clear and cold as I checked out the little rock garden and looked across the bay to the Uplands shore. There was the big rock garden, dark along the shore as the sun lowered in the west. If you look on a chart of Oak Bay you can see that big rock garden marked as The Naze.
And a fine one it is, too. (Naze? What the heck is a naze?)
Turns out, this bit of shoreline was named for a place in England. Well, that makes sense... sort of. Funny that it wasn't named for a place in Scotland, since there were so many Scots among the Hudson's Bay Company men. Andrew Scott wrote about The Naze in his book The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names:
"This point was named after a headland on the E[ast] coast of Essex, an important area for migrating birds. ...The Naze was not officially adopted as a BC name until 1981, though it appears on TN Hibben & Co's 1913 map of Victoria. The name derives from ness, the Old English word for a headland. Several other promontories in the Cadboro Bay area commemorate English E coast landforms."
Now I'm going to have to check all the other promontories to see what they're named. Let's see, there's Spurn Head and what else... It's not kayaking, but it's what I think about sometimes when messing about in boats and sometimes when I wish that I were. And I have to get that copy of Andrew Scott's encyclopedia back to the library before it's overdue.
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